Notification from long-running tasks

Yesterday I thought of a technique which has become a real time-saver for me. (I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this; I remember reading something similar in Time Management for System Administrators.)

You can get notification from any long-running task on the command line like this:

do_my_task; make_a_sound

For example, using Rake on a Mac:

rake db:reseed; say 'done'

Now I start rebuilding the database and move to another window, knowing that I'll get audible notification when that task is complete.