Once I started branching things got quicker and more effective because I could bounce between tasks without affecting my deployment (master branch). In five days of frantic coding using git branching I now have a clean easy deployment of about 750 lines, which I iterated on through four different branches and, probably over 3000 lines of code.
It's not perfect, but it's eliminated any apprehension about aggressively changing my application, and made me far more ambitious. I feel great about it.