Sometimes I find myself doing "git stash; git stash apply" just so I have a checkpoint of what I'm working on. That plus "git stash list -p" lets me go back through tons of non-checked in junk to find (say) that one line of debugging code that turned out to be pretty useful…
You can do small temporary commits on a branch, and once you want to do an actual commit which will then be pushed, you go onto the master branch and `git merge --squash <work-branch>`.
Git makes using branches very easy and it is fairly quick with most operations. Once you understand what the commands are doing, you'll see that unless you do something specifically (like reset --hard with uncommitted changes, checkout a modified file etc.), you'll never lose work which has been committed in some branch or the other.
I tend to just do "in-between" commits very often and rebase to reorganise the commits (reorder, squash, reword) when I hit a (micro)milestone.
If your work has been committed and the repo was not just garbage collected, it is going to be easy to retrieve it from reflog even if you did something nasty with the branch and it appears that your commit has disappeared.
Git is the piece of software which I find very good in terms of what it does but it does it behind the worst user-interface I have ever encountered.
