Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile likens work life to running on a treadmill. People are continually trying to keep up with the accumulating obligations of meetings, email, deadlines, and the never-ending need to be more productive and creative: to do more with less.

“Many companies are running much too lean right now in terms of the number of employees,” said Amabile, a director of research at Harvard Business School. So the treadmill simply accelerates, adding to the stress that generally makes people less productive not more.

To be more productive, it's often better to start by doing less, said Amabile, and to get a clear view of the big picture first before diving in with doing and doing more. What is the single most important thing managers can do to enhance workplace creativity? “Protect at least 30 to 60 minutes each day for yourself and your people that’s devoted to quiet reflection,” Amabile says.

Amabile has spent the last 35 years researching life inside organizations and how it influences employees and their performance (what Amabile describes as “inner work life”). Much of her work is included in her 2011 book “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work,” co-written with Steven Kramer, Amabile’s husband.

“People become less engaged in their work if their creativity isn’t supported,” Amabile explains. “They will also be less productive because they often can’t focus on their most important work. In the long term, companies may lose their most talented employees, as well as losing out because they won’t have the innovative products, innovative services, and business models that they need to be competitive.”

Instead, said Amabile, companies should support creativity by consciously removing people from that treadmill.

“Managers and employees need to work together to constantly prioritize, to figure out what is truly important, what they can forget about, and what can they push to the back burner in order to reduce time pressure. My colleague here at HBS, Leslie Perlow, found that, in a department of harried engineers, it was powerful to simply declare ‘quiet time’ in the morning, three days a week: no meetings with or phone calls to colleagues, no interruptions, no expecting immediate responses to emails. People were way more productive. They also felt less stressed and more satisfied with their work.”

Amabile described a time-pressured employee “who moved to the room where the boxes were stored and stayed there for the entire day, really getting into a flow state” of uninterrupted creativity.

Managers, Amabile reminded, should be removing obstacles to creative work, especially in times of deadline pressure. She gives the example of “one team that had a limited time frame to solve a problem with $145 million at stake. What the managers did was to clear the decks for that team, to get people off the treadmill. You have to basically stop that treadmill. Sometimes, that means physically separating” people from distractions like telephones and email.

Managers also should provide employees with meaningfulness and a sense of progress, Amabile said. Her research has said that the latter (“The Progress Principle”) is the biggest catalyst for creative work. Yet most managers don’t understand how important “small wins” are to an employee’s intrinsic motivation. “We know from our research with employees that ‘making progress in meaningful work’ was the No. 1 day-to-day motivator, and by a huge margin.

To work creatively, people “have to feel like they’re on a mission. They have to understand why it’s important to get it done now; otherwise, it’s like a death march. Meaningfulness is important, as is understanding the urgency, buying into it, and being able to focus.” Managers can support these factors, thereby nurturing employees’ intrinsic motivation when time pressure is unavoidable.

If intrinsic motivation is so important to creativity, what about extrinsic motivators (higher pay, promotion, and recognition)? Supporting intrinsic motivation “doesn’t mean that extrinsic motivators need to be absent,” says Amabile. “Most of us operate under a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the creative work we do. It’s also important to make a living for what we do, to get recognition for what we do. What matters is that intrinsic motivation be stronger than extrinsic.”

Chuck Leddy is a Boston-based freelance business writer.