TL;DR - Spent some time learning your tools (Git specifically). There are good tutorials for git available and you can probably pick up enough to be comfortable using branches in less than 1 hour. I am assuming/recommending that when you work through the tutorial you do so in a new repository (so that you don't impact your current production code/repository). Keeping the code in your repository clean is important - it's another form of technical debt - if the repository is clean it is easier to follow what happened in the past. However as long as you make time to do the cleanup before you `git push` it's not all the important when you commit - I make a lot of commits as I am working, with comments indicating what changes I made. Then before I push I clean up my history using `git rebase` and push a sanitized history to other developers. **Edit per the comment:** If I was in this position, I would just create a new branch and commit the code there, after a week if I found I didn't need it I would delete the branch. Locally, I don't think it really matters where you put it (commit to new branch, stash, commit+revert or just throw the code away) if you are going to do a cleanup before you push it, it’s simply a matter of whatever workflow works best for you. However, if I wanted others to view the code then having it on a separate (pushed/remote) branch makes it clear that this is something you considered, but choose not to move forward with.