The age old "eat an elephant one piece at a time". No one ever tells you that there's a freezer you can put the pieces of the elephant in, and focus on the most perishable bits first. :)
The one thing I hate about the task lists that are often given at work, often by disoganised managers, is that everything has a top priority, and it is the employee that needs to sit down with the manager and say:
"What is the real priority, because if everything is a priority, nothing is."
I've always worked to my own lists, they're more effective because I've set them. Micro managers often set lists as you say, but I think they're less effective as the operator has not often had a say in them.
I think it gets to be worse as people move away from conventional business logic to "Agile". Conventional business logic tends to go and chase the highest ROI first, and to remove the biggest crisis / break points / bottlenecks in order of benefit.
In "agile" (which is the norm for the sort of IT work I tend to do) - its all about vague, unconnected tasks that each unconnected person completes that somehow, magically, through a combination of all of them being done, does something bigger than the sum of its parts.
It works in software development, but when you're trying to solve a business problem that isn't related to software (say... responding to an audit from a government body) - it tanks productivity and was ultimately one of the reasons I chose to take my redundancy - because that work environment wasn't productive.
Sounds like your way is, and it should be :) Always helps if someone knows what the fuck is going on, right?