ORIGINAL: Fenrisfil
Starting in pre-warp I micromanage everything except taxes.
Micromanaging taxes on your home world is by far the most influential task regarding long term development.
The thing to do regarding taxation is to keep your homeworld's tax at zero for as long as you can afford. When you do need money, tax as heavily as you can without your population rebelling - I like to keep their happiness at zero or slightly above, as there may be some risks involved when pushing it lower.
If you come into the situation that you feel you need to tax your homeworld before it has reached max population, you should consider to establish a colony or two (expensive and time consuming, and depending on your technological development not feasible early game) or invade an indy or neighbor to encourage your civil sector to spend money on transport ships, just to get cash reserves so you can lower taxes to zero for a time again.
This switching between no tax and 'maximum tax' will let your homeworld's population rise faster to the maximum level than any other strategy. Your homeworld will for a very long time be the only worthwhile source of money (unless you take over a rival empire's homeworld), and the taxes you do earn are totally proportional to the population of a given planet (times development level, times corruption factor and so on...), so the faster you have it max out there, the more you'll get back later, with big, fat interest.
This is, arguably besides controlling exploration manually, the one most important aspect of this game where micromanagement pays off. Neglecting it is equivalent to raising the overall difficulty (which may be completely desireable, regarding how easy it can become when you micromanage too much).
