That can be a bit tricky with Bioware games since they tend to have soft timers and points of no return, which they're pretty bad at telegraphing. For example, ME2 has a soft timer that triggers unavoidable story missions, and an event late in the game where if you haven't done all the side material, trying to finish it all up before what is clearly a point-of-no-return it can have dire plot consequences. Similarly, if you charge ahead you're likely to miss a very important loyalty mission. Even worse is ME3 where the missions labelled "priority" are the ones that trigger plot advancement and taking them early can lock out side-quests and even kill major characters...and you can't know that ahead of time unless you've already played.
I'm kind of a completionist (I literally just spent 2 hrs replaying the Omega DLC to get a buggy achievement to stay unlocked this time!) so my usual thing is to do as much as I can before advancing the plot any further, but in an open world that can mean *hours* of gameplay with little or no plot and I totally get how people can easily get bored of that.
When I played Andromeda, I held off triggering what I thought might be the final mission for like two weeks while I ran around every planet, turning over every stone, gathering as much crafting goodies as possible. It made me really appreciate the combat system, but also exposed how samey all the planets were from a gameplay perspective once you get past the aesthetics.
