Here's my practice piece with the screenshot for example!
Yeah, that's a great trick, instead of using Local Transforms.
In general; in Object Mode: ALT+D followed by ALT+R. You can use that for any weirdly oriented models.
Just make sure to: always Rotate in Object Mode and never Apply the Rotation! (At least, as long as possible, there are times, when you have to Apply Rotation, that will break this workflow.)
If your Scene has a lot of models, you might be better off, just model in a separate file (unrotated) and Link them in in an 'assembly file'.
I used this trick all the time, but then I learned about custom transformations. If you're interested, JL does it around 17:52 in this video:
I learned about Custom Orientation (a life saver, that always works, no matter what) from the legendary Jonathan Williamson in what is at the moment the oldest Course, still in the active library:
https://cgcookie.com/courses/interior-architectural-vizualization