You need to figure out the right order to do things in to carry things out more efficiently. For example, I started out not having any babies other than the one the tutorial prompted me to have, so this meant less mouths to feed. I set one villager on research, and the rest collecting berries constantly. The first tech thing I bought was for farming, which helps with food, and though I got a few other things in between the first thing I maxed out was also farming because food is really the first priority. Whenever I wasn't so low on food I set -all- the villagers on research. Then I'd turn off the game with it going at 2x and come back every hour or so to make sure they were doing okay. You can advance pretty fast this way and it isn't as tedious if you aren't watching it constantly. Be sure to pause it when you'll be away for more than a few hours though.
Of course this is only my first game, so you may not want to listen to me, but aside from a few tense moments where they were short on food and I had them picking berries nonstop, I've been doing pretty well. IT just takes planning, not constant running around trying to make the villagers do things they aren't advanced enough to do yet.