Adding six lowercase characters/numbers increases the difficulty by a factor of a billion. So if you look at a typical 8 character rule and go up to 14 random characters you're perfectly safe on md5.
...which, sadly, will lead to a proliferation of yellow stickies. Depending on the physical security of the individual workstation, this may not necessarily be a bad thing (but in the most common case "anyone has physical access" probably will be)
