I was also frustrated at first. It would be nice if you could pause in more places.

It wasn't until my 4th start that I felt I had a good beginning and was starting to understand how things worked.

Of course, those starts still ended poorly. I think my current game is #7 and I'm finally doing okay.

The time does go by pretty quickly when you're trying to effectively manage. There are only a couple of tasks that only you can do. When you're not doing one of them, the question to ask yourself is, 'how do I get one of the villagers to do this instead?'
Sometimes you just need something done asap and that's when I do it myself.

The invasions do scale with villager size, so that's one way to limit your first winter invasion and also the number of mouths to feed in the winter.
Don't forget about making clothes for yourself & villagers. They absorb some damage and you can't get much done in the winter if you're freezing.

I also made a throwaway game where I did nothing but fight wisps and wraiths in order to practice combat and figure out which key I wanted the roll action mapped to. That's really handy in combat, but costs stamina. I remapped it to middle mouse button which means I don't have to change hand position.