Any tips, strategies, words of caution to help me tame this beast?
Use the guided weekly review webinar to start fresh.
Dump eveything you cannot handle right now into someday maybe. If it's paper label a folder someday/maybe, if it's electronic create a file folder in your system and just dump stuff in there.
Triage uour inboxes by cherry picking the urgent/critical things and dumping the rest into backlog to be dealt with later and plan spending 10-15 minutes each day processing backlog.
GTD should be easy to handle even in stress, low energy, when sick etc. If it isn't then you need modify your system to handle those situations. System mods are not easy to start when you are having problems so don't worry about that yet just add a someday/maybe item to be "develop simple GTD workflow I can use" as a project for later.
Cut yourself some slack, things slide for everyone.
Right now my paper inbox is again overflowing and my e-mail inbox is at over 30 unprocessed messages. We've had a major project that has taken every daylight hour for the past 2 days. 1 more day to go and then I can recover and get back on track. I already blocked out 4 hours on my calendar just to try to process all my inboxes. It will probably take me 4-5 days to get back up to date. Part of that is going to be ratehr large weekly review that I expect to take about 6 hours over 3-4 days. As stuff comes in I am triaging and only dealing with the absolutely time critical things. Everything else is just being added to "In" for later.