How to prioritize effectively?

Prioritizing task effectively is vital in time management. This is skill of identifying the task of more importance and shifting the complete focus on it. Everyone of us has many things to deal with, but it is simply not possible to deal with all in a time. Delegating them to other might not work well either at times. Hence, prioritizing is the ideal when you have limited to time to deal with unlimited demands.
Prioritizing best aid in spending your and your team's time more wisely. This way, you can categorize the task into crucial and those of less important, which can be attended later. In this competitive world, success is everything, and with the proper prioritizing, you would surely achieve it with less stress and frustration.
Lets take a simple example to understand the concept of prioritizing. You are given a task of filling up an empty buck with rocks, pebbles, and sand, the only criteria is that the bucket should have no space left out. How would you go about it? Many would puzzle whether to fill in the sand first or the pebbles. A time management training master would know well which way will work best. It is of course the rock, followed by pebbles, and finally the sand to fill in the empty space.
Now, let us discuss this in the perspective of your work. In a day, you have 24 hours, in which 50-60% is left for your activities. When you have multiple tasks to be accomplished, find which ones are vital, difficult, or deadlines nearing (rocks), hence you will be paying more attention on it. Then comes those tasks which can wait for sometime (pebbles). You can shift you focus on them on completion of rocks. When you are left with no important work and finding yourself a bit free, then you can sit and relaxedly finish of the tasks of less or no importance.
Below are some more tips to help you in effective prioritizing:
1)Maintain a To Do List, which is concise. It is not necessary that you list out all the sub-tasks to be performed. This would give a clear picture what you have to accomplish.
2)Analyze which task has to be completed first, prioritize them in descending order. Don't be hurry with this, only a meticulous analysis could give you a better understanding.
3)On completing the analysis, rewrite the To Do List.
4)If you not able to do it on your own, take the assistance of your co-worker. This way, you can prove that you are a good team player and receptive to constructive feedback.
5)After deriving the final list, check whether any task can be eliminated or delegated.
6)Once you have completed prioritizing, ensure that you do jump to the task 2 before the task 1 is completed, ans so on.

7)In case of unplanned activities, you need keep your goals in mind and rely on your instincts. A better clarity of your goals would surely help you in such circumstances.