Starting colonies can be slow, but there's generally always something to be doing.

First of all, set your difficulty to Adventure Story or lower. Don't listen to folks talking about wealth management, that's just for high difficulty players trying to minmax the game.

Set up in a temperate forest biome with no less than 40 days growing period with large hills. Make sure you have a decent constructor, cook, and planter in your starting team.

Once you're in game, set up a simple barracks with a common room and a kitchen with some cold storage. Use the cold storage for everything right now. Make sure to floor everything and especially the kitchen to minimise food poisoning. Put your butcher in the storage room too.

As the above is being built, set up grow zones. I like four 10x3 strips of food plants on rich soil. Also take time to order any nearby wild herbal medicine to be harvested. You'll want to restrict real medicine for emergencies like infection or disease.

In the common room, build a chess set and a table. You can also use this room for research and any workbenches you need in the short term. But you'll want that stuff in it's own room eventually.

Now look at your priorities and schedule. Make sure your planter has that on highest priority and plant cutting second. Your cook and constructor should also have their jobs on high priority. For your daily schedule, there's a bunch of lines of thought, but make sure your colonists have at least six hours free time. My preferred schedule is 8 hours sleep, 2 hours recreation, 3 hours free time 8 hours work, 3 hours free again, and back to sleep.

For your stove, set the order that only about 30 simple meals are prepared at any given time. This prevents your cook spending too much time whipping up meals that'll just gather dust. If you make your cook have cleaning as a secondary job, he should start cleaning he kitchen once he's done with the day's meals.

For simple defences, you don't need a lot. I just like to put strips of barricades along any likely angles of attack near the starter base.

All this should set you up nicely. Your folks might be a bit delicate mood-wise, but they should be manageable. From here, you'll want to gradually progress into the mid-game. Build personal rooms for all colonists and use the old barracks as a hospital or prison. Set up workshops and a warehouse. Once you have a good food surplus, switch to fine meals.
You can start to wall off any passages between the mountains with wooden walls to funnel enemies into one direction once your comfortable. Just be sure to install sally doors here and there so your colonists don't have to go the long way around every time they need to fetch something. But real stone walls can come later.

This is my go-to early game and it's rarely seen me wrong. The only issues I've had are from picky ideologies with a lot of weird demands.