It's true. The next time you are writing a program or building something or whatever, stop and
think about how you're doing it. Chances are that doing it
backwards would be easier, cleaner, and take less time. I have personally found this to be the case when writing some part of a
Perl script that deals with a
data structure.
This idea orginiated during a discussion Ted and I had about reverse polish notation. He explained that the first idea was polish notation (which would be prefix notation). That didn't work out too well, so they said "This would be easier if we did it backwards", converted it to postfix notation, and came up with an easier way to do it.
Note that this does not just apply to computer stuff. It works as a good motto for life. Everything would be easier if we did it backwards.