One very important piece of advice given to me by Ashok Balakrishnan is that in industry you have to learn to figure out quickly what really matters and what doesn’t. As he relayed when I interviewed him for my book, “Turning Science into Things People Need“:
“(In industry) there are certain things that are important and have to be done right now. Other things may seem important, but don’t really matter. It is critical to be able to assess a lot of pressures, and then determine which ones are critical and which will not really matter in the end.”
I agree with this. Time is money, as the cliché goes, and there is rarely enough time/money to work out all of the details for all of the problems you face. If you attempt to do this, you will fall behind someone else who is more efficient. Learn to determine quickly what issues need your valuable time and which ones just need to be left undone.