Do you play the game from your, the gamers, perspective OR the perspective of the people living in that world? The choice is up to you in this game...
I play mostly as a gamer, but I make nods to the perspective of the people.
These are mostly for the fun factor, but also to make some of the strategic decision-making easier.
For example, rather than constantly assess and re-assess the strategic tradeoffs of building research labs (instead of something else immediately useful), I generally decide what percentage of total income my people want to spend for ongoing research, and I build labs at a constant percent of Earth industry to maintain research spending at the target percentage.
I also establish minimum requirements that the people have for moving population to new systems: grav survey complete, all jump points explored (and monitored by sentry platforms), all neighboring systems free of hostile presence, etc. These restrictions make my empire expand in a fashion that respects the risk perception of the people of a live empire, rather than my own as a gamer.