Drush is my friend
Drush (Drupal + Shell) is a set of scripts that lets you control your Drupal site directly from the command line. Without every touching your mouse you can clear the cache, do an SQL Dump ,and even download and enable modules directly from drupal.org.
Since inserting Drush into my workflow I've saved hours of downloading modules and adding them into my svn repositories (drush dl); grabbing top-level information about my sites (drush st); and even running some quick code snippits (drush eval).
Sooo good.