I’ve created a very simple but useful admin page recently that shows all background jobs (indexing, publishing etc.) currently running on the Sitecore instance. So if you’re ever wondering why the instance is running slow or why jobs are being queued you can take a peek at /sitecore/admin/ViewJobs.aspx

You might want to apply some styling though 😉
Here you go:

By the way: Sitecore rocks lets you do the same thing too. But I found an admin page would be more handy in production.