Note that the town is randomly generated. If you don't like your town, you might want to start over and see if you can get a better town.
I believe you have to run six errands total for Tom Nook before you're done with that. Don't be afraid to take off your work uniform though, there's no consequence and you don't have to wear that ugly thing. Plus Nook's reaction is priceless.
Buy a fishing rod as soon as you can. There are gold in them thar fish! You can get a lot of money from selling the fish that you catch, I would suggest selling them in the beginning and worry about donating them to the museum later. Fish in the ocean, those are generally worth more. I seem to catch a lot of Red Snappers, which are worth $3,000 each.
After you finish with Nook's errands, that's when you can get your friend code and start visiting others. It could be beneficial to do this early on; Maxi and I have a lot of different types of fruit, and Tom Nook will pay $500 for a piece of foreign fruit even if you grow it in your own town. What kind of fruit grows in your town?
If a coconut washes up on the beach, bury it to grow a coconut palm.
As Maxi was saying, if you leave a shovel buried for 24 hours then dig it up, it will become a golden shovel. You won't need this in the beginning though, as its benefit is that you can bury money and have it grow into a money tree. You'd need a lot of money or else the tree won't grow.
Might have to get her her own game to keep her off mine, ha. And she said it didn't interest her a while back.
Why would you buy her a game of your own? Can't you share? Does she even have her own system? Because otherwise that's incredibly pointless.