This is a little tip that I learned while working on a couple of posters and can help with multitasking. For a couple of posters I used radial blur; which at the high resolution I was using could take up to 5 minutes to process depending on the settings and blur area. So instead of staring at the progress bar creep across the window I could work on other tasks until I could go back to work. A little setting called “Beep When Done” in your preferences is disabled by default but by turning this on you are immediately notified by a little ding that your task has completed. You may not find that this is necessary to have on when working with smaller workspaces but I have found this to be incredibly helpful when working in large format comps.

Beep when done can be accessed under your general preferences under your edit menu.