Digging back into the dusty reaches of my memory through the way-back machine, as Wayne might say, if you have 1 or 2 or 3 commonly used volumes I always found it handy to have a volumetric flask. It has no markings on it except on the neck, where it has a single engraved line that marks the point where when the meniscus of the liquid in the flask touches that line (generally, at room temperature) the volume is exactly the stated volume. I ran a reaserch lab at Columbia for 3 years and this was the handiest way, short of a mechanical dispenser to do set-ups using the same volumes - - and they are much more accurate and a lot cheaper than the mechanical dispensers were at that time.

For smaller volumes (<=100ml), as described above, we used glass pipets, with a pipet bulb for hazardous or biological materials.