Years ago, I used tiny header bar progress indicators while doing org mode based presentations inside Emacs. They are basically header line strings with colors and symbols to indicate progress of some kind. I thought to use them again so made a small package header-progress. Here are two of the bars that I use:
I have used these primarily in org-present, but I can see them helpful in long org files, during various async operations, and when Emacs is taking in speech input. I specially like the indeterminate progress bar since I have needed this in many external async calls. Though it's very slow at the moment and I need to figure out how the header-line re-display works in Emacs to make it work smoothly.