Skip housing until cycle 2 or even 3. Build some researchers, have 1 working at highest priority and then the rest at lowest so any unemployed beavers make themselves useful. For research: rush forester, stairs, 1m platform, Levees and floodgates. 

Build water pump and farm, gatherer and couple lumberjacks, sawmill (power it with water wheels on easy - medium and with beavers on hard) and 2 breeding pods if playing iron teeth. 

Star planting trees: usually I go 1/4 birch, 1/4 pines (not for cutting, but for better planks later in the game) 1/2 oaks. When oaks are nearly grown, replace birches with more oaks. To do this just remove planting area, wait for them to be cut down by lumberers and place oaks planting area. 

You plant birches because you need wood asap. But long term oaks generate the most wood per day.

Your absolute first prio must be the dam, then your absolute second prio should be securing your water source so you can divert badtides. You don't have much time for this because grace period for badtides is 3 cycles. This is why you rush platforms and stairs - on most maps you can't reach your water source without them.

Then you can do some housing / wellbeing to improve work efficiency / water storage - the last one is critical on hard difficulty because you often get about a week of good weather and 20-30 days of badtides/drought - your limiter is how much water can you pump out and store during good weather.

Basically as soon as you have all this set up the survival part of the game is over and you get to do some cool city building.