One of the first things you need to do is to get to know your data. Some people call this initial data exploration, shaking hands with your data, or dating your data.
Regardless of what you call it, get a sense of the characteristics of the information you have BEFORE you start doing any modeling or analysis is absolutely imperative.
Doing this will ensure that you are conducting the analyses that match the characteristics of your data, but will also help you head-off any data issues you might have BEFORE you are knee (or neck) deep in analyses and you are drawing incorrect conclusions because you did not get to know your data BEFORE you started your analyses.
skimr is designed to provide summary statistics about variables in data frames, tibbles, data tables and vectors. It is opinionated in its defaults, but easy to modify.