Not really a hack and not very complex - this is just a simple command line tool to follow the progress of many PBS jobs. Simply:

 watch -n 10 'qstat -a | grep -c username'

where username is your username. It simply counts the number of jobs (queued or running) under your name, every 10 s in this case.

I like to use a horizontally split multi gnome terminal and in the second terminal, run something like:

 watch -n 10 'ls file* | wc -l'

where file* would be a wildcard for the output files from your job. This way you can watch the output files accumulate and the PBS jobs disappear at the same time.