Just had a great (and dead-simple) idea, and I do *not* know why I didn't think of this 20 years ago:

(in my ~.bashrc2*):
workingdirls="$(ls ~/working)"
if [[ $workingdirls ]]; then
    echo
    echo "*** Contents of working directory ***"
    echo "$workingdirls"
fi

You can put anything there, including symlinks to projects you're working on and don't want to forget.

*I use a separate .bashrc2 file so it can be synced across systems without overwriting the distro stock config in .bashrc.