Our fellow #labviewfriend Benjamin Hinrichs recently stumbled upon a nice overview of how to keep things in order with git: 8 years ago, Justin Hileman published a flowchart by the name of "git pretty", outlining on a single page how to keep your git repositories' history tidy.
It comes as part of a feature-length article which covers lessons learned from using Git in the open source community. The article describes in detail how to work with branches, how to commit, and - maybe most interestingly - how to modify the history of your repo to keep it tidy.
You can find the article including the flowchart on Justin's website at http://justinhileman.info/article/changing-history/.
And never forget: In case of fire, git out of the building!