Branches are a method for organization. I organize papers by putting them in a stack on my desk. If the stack gets too big I throw them in a box, intending to g

Branches are a method for organization. I organize papers by putting them in a stack on my desk. If the stack gets too big I throw them in a box, intending to go through them later. But of course I never do. This is obviously a horrible scheme, but I get by just fine because the volume of truly important papers I deal with is small. It surely wouldn't scale. Even so, more orderly people are probably cringing as they read the above, and to some degree they're right. But I write code for a living, and I spend more time cleaning up my file system, organizing source code, et al. I do this because I know that not doing this ends up as more work than doing it. I use branches so that when I'm in the middle of implementing a feature and a user comes to me with a bug report I do not have to sweat having half refactored, half implemented, uncompilable stuff. I can switch branches and work on the bug. Ditto for interfacing with other devs working in other parts of the code. Finally, I have to wonder if you've used branches enough to get a feel for what they can do for you. I know that using CVS and Subversion I avoided branching as a scary and tricky thing. Having them work so easily in Git I began branching and found that it changed my workflow for the better in a fairly painless way.