I am thirteen years and nearly 15,000 people into this great, fun, fulfilling Family Genealogy adventure. Several things you need to pay very careful attention to.
Become intimately familiar with your program - don't 2nd guess anything, because it WILL get you into deep trouble (voice of experience). It is exceedingly difficult to correct some errors you might make, due to intertwining of the names you enter. I use a very user-friendly program called Family Treemaker 2019. However, I erred by not printing the manual before I was FAR into my file.
Run and become familiar with "reports" early-on. I abused the "Notes" capability, not knowing how it would affect me later. I ended-up with dozens of useless pages in my report! I've spent the past three weeks making "corrections". On the up-side, I've found some new data - always good news.
DO NOT, ever, fully trust just one source. In five Census records alone, you could find four different spellings of a name. Take a close look at Census records - you could be showing a cousin in the household as one of the family's children. Or, aunty Jane as mother Jane. Apparently, Ancestry has scanned the Census records through an OCR program without any sort of "validation" step. Although they are great launching pads, they are exceedingly, full of errors! Always hope to find a findagrave.com record, because it generally has a photo of someone's gravestone, and often an obituary and family notations.
Don't fully trust somebody else's genealogy file; rather, use it as another great launchpad. They are generally correct, but I have frequently found grossly inaccurate data there. You'll once-in-a-while find truly delightful files full of good sourcing. Sometimes, someone is just dabbling and not exerting serious research.
Speaking of Sourcing: study, learn, study, learn. Trust me, there are WRONG ways to enter them.
Have a blast - but, know that you can become an addict!
By-the-way, if you find yourself becoming weary or distracted, shut-it-down!
