I'll always follow an official route order, and if the initial routes are LIs I'm not interested in, I'm acting like the distracted boyfriend meme—eyeing the other LIs during routes that aren't theirs.
When I first started playing visual novels in general, I would follow my heart, but my heart often led me to locked routes that required other endings to be finished first. It takes a lot out of me when it already took a while to reach that point, only to need to replay later once I meet the unlock requirements…