I have to agree with Morpheus......
Come up with a denomination-based breakdown of what you will be working with. At the same time "Maybe", depending on your understanding / research of coinage, Micro-manage the sortation within the denomination. If you look at it by dates you would be managing them into groups based on "Silver" or whatever metal content you would be working with.
After that gets completed. Take the one that you feel would be the lease overwhelming. Best way to get discouraged is trying to jump into something "Too Much". As you work on the smaller batches you can tweak how things get done, hopefully, find/develop some shortcuts/methodology that will make the progression to the larger batches easier.
Hope this helps... Good Luck