I find myself doing more and more of my file system tasks in emacs with dired. The package dired+ adds some extra features to dired, one of which I discovered today.
The command diredp-dired-recent-dirs, bound to C-x R by default, presents you with a list of recent directories that you can then choose to open in dired. I have found to be a really quick way to find the directory I want to open, especially when combined with ivy-mode (or one of the other completion packages).
Dired+ can be installed from the normal package repositories.
Update
This post is superseded by this one.
Pragmatic Emacs 