For a beginner ("newbie") (or even a more advanced meditator) I suggest starting the day with one meditation session for 30 mintues and then meditating for ten minutes every hour for the rest of the day.

Inbetween meditation sessions avoid anything that causes mental turbulence. Try to do things as mindfully as possible. It's okay to take a walk, read, watch videos, do chores around the house - as long as it doesn't cause mental turbulence. Reading and watching videos have to be monitored carefully, both can cause turbulence or be relaxing depending on the content.

What you find is that if you avoid mental turbulence the mind coasts along in a meditative state between sessions so that it is really like you are still meditating, with short boosters every hour. Like you're riding on a child's scooter gliding along smoothly but pushing with your foot every once in a while to keep up your momentum.

It might sound ineffective with too little meditation,  but I find it is very, very powerful, very very effective.

It's very easy to do so it doesn't need as much will power. And it helps you learn to live your practice so you can keep up the habit of living mindfully and keeping the mind tranquil even after the "retreat" is over.

Concentration is always a good practice, but there are some areas that are often ignored and could be fun to practice with.

Letting Go: https://youtu.be/iekCpuNqmek

Learning not just to look at things arise and pass away, but like with Upasika Kee Nanayon, to envision drawbacks to desires, it can help to cultivate dispassion much further. The partial reason for this is that just because things are impermanent doesn't take care of the fact that we like what we like in the short-term and the mind doesn't need pleasure or interest to be permanent to see its value. Short-term pleasure is enough. To see short-term pleasures as also having drawbacks can reduce addictiveness.

Dispassion all the time needs help with pleasure in meditation and pleasure in relaxing the body to keep the mind from being so disenchanted and pessimistic. Concentration by itself does a lot, but deliberately enjoying the form of the body and sensation helps to relax habitual rigidity in the body. 

Actualism practices, or my understanding of it, could help to look at taking the Bahiya Sutta and but instead focus on enjoying the pleasure of sensation. This can attenuate the self, or in my understanding, the self becomes more of a sensation-self. The brain finds enough pleasure in the moment that it doesn't need to leap off into the future as much.

This is NOT the Actualism Method: http://psychreviews.org/this-is-not-the-actualism-method/

Another practice is learning a wonderment practice from Heidegger, influenced by Parmenides. Some of this will naturally come from concentration where child-like wonder at existence is developed in the adult brain. This comes with comparing experience to nothing so that a gratitude for the mundane can cultivate. This practice itself has helped with dealing with people, but I still have to cultivate it for some years to make it more regular, though I can bring it on much easier now.

Parmenides: https://youtu.be/dWdVTN5LQKs

Shargrol is exceptionally sane and realistic on retreats: check the relevant sections in his compiliation here ---  A compilation of shargrol's posts at dharmaoverground.org (shargrolpostscompilation.blogspot.com)