I do try, some of them are hard, like picking out weeds, you need to pick it least 2000 to get golden and my town has beautiful ordiance so that's long. I don't even know how to do the turnip badge. I mainly just try and finish collecting all bugs and fish.
Most of the first year I had no idea about all the different badges. I went in blind to the game and figured out things as I went. At the time I was too busy playing with the villagers and watering all the flowers. Yes I didn't know what Beautiful did so I was watering flowers for hours. Fixed that and I had a lot of free time so I started working slowly on the badge. On the 3rd year the mayor completed her streetpass badge and got Gold on all the badge.
After I was done playing my side players and my 2nd town mayor slowly worked on their badges. The 2nd town mayor badges are complete. The 2 side players just need to visit/host and streetpass. I'm lucky and have an extra 3DS so I can tag myself. I do find the visiting/hosting very boring. So I'm just doing it when they need to go to another town.
The turnip badge is easier if you let one of your extra players buy the turnips. They drop them on sell day and the mayor picks them up to sell. The mayor never bought the turnips so the price bought doesn't get removed.
With the K.K. Slider badges I sent one of my players over to listen to music. While two were listening to music I watched TV or played another game. Dream badge is easy to get while watching TV. Let the game pick a random town and leave as soon as you arrive. If the town is nice I would walk up to the train station and take a picture of the dream address to visit it later.
I'm a collector in all video games. I'll looks for the last coin before I leave a level.