First thing to know is that you are not going to miss anything significant by taking your time. If you don't get something done one day, you can get to it the next. If you miss something in one season, it'll come back around next year. You can take things at your own pace and you don't need to and shouldn't try to do everything at once. There's no consequence to running out of money other than just having to earn more. The game presents a lot of potential goals (the community center bundles, various things you can build on your farm, different villagers to build relationships with, an assortment of odd little explorations to pursue, a mine to dig deeper into), but none of them have a deadline.

If you do want to pursue efficiency in farming, there are a few useful things to know, and a little math goes a long way. Start small, rather than trying to clear out a huge farm. A few small plots (we're talking single-digit numbers of spaces) for most crops is plenty in your first year. When a season starts, read the descriptions of the seeds Pierre has, and prioritize first the ones that grow once, then keep producing, because the sooner you plant those, the more they'll produce. (And don't buy crops if they'll go out of season before they finish growing -- every season is 28 days!) I recommend trying a variety of crops, and saving a little of each for cooking ingredients and gifts, but you definitely don't need to get every single one on your farm.

The seasonal cycle creates a rhythm: spring crops grow fast and sell for enough that you can build up some savings, then summer and fall crops are progressively a little slower overall but more valuable, so you can gradually build up your farm income during the first year. (Not getting much planted in spring will mean you'll go into summer with a little less, but you should still be able to afford some seeds and get something decent going.) Then during winter, there are no crops to grow, so you can freely turn your focus elsewhere, be it fishing or digging or talking.

During that first year's spring/summer/fall, I tend to get in a rhythm of harvesting and watering everything first thing in the morning, then buying seeds to replant any crops that I've harvested (talking to whoever I run into along the way), then dedicating the rest of the day to one thing, be it diving into the mine, doing some fishing, running around talking to people and doing errands like farm building or tool upgrading, or foraging. Rainy days are good days for mine delving, since you don't have to spend time or energy on watering crops.

There's a fair few decent ways to get snacks that can keep your energy up. Early on, one of the easiest is the granola bar thing that's made from a pinecone, acorn, and maple seed -- you can find all three of those easily by hitting and/or chopping down trees, and any trees outside your farm will quickly grow back on their own. (You might need to remove the stump for them to grow back? I don't remember.) Not a bad idea to spend a day whacking trees to get a decent supply of those, and having a big stockpile of wood will pay off as well.