Well, for starters, I never have my villagers clean the beach or build the first hut until I have enough tech points to purchase the next level of Farming Technology (unless I'm doing some special testing). They don't need a clean beach until they're ready to start fishing, and the berry bush won't comfortably support more than about 7 villagers - so they don't really need that new hut just yet.

I usually put one or two villagers to work gathering berries and everyone else gets plonked down at the research table. As soon as they've got enough points, I always buy Farming tech first. Different people have different strategies after that (you can search the forums and find many discussions about it), but basically everybody gets farming first.