Shell enhancement to round-robin through list of directories

When working at the command line (Unix mostly) I am often working with files in several directories at once. The pushd and popd commands are useful but require a strict stacked directory use and require too much planning for me to use efficiently. (Clearly, self actualization has reached a new level of specificity.) What would be better would be a way to change directories by rotating through a list of directories. Much as is done today with applications vis Cmd-Tab under Mac OS X and Alt-Tab under Windows. Configuring the list of directories should be via a hot-key. The hot-key should work not only when in the current working directory but also when using filename completion. Often, the directories I want to return to are discovered during filename completion. So, one hot-key is used to add and remove directories from the list and another hot-key to change directories to the next directory in the list.