It's not that I don't know what work I'm doing, it's that I don't know how to give it a unique name.

Sometimes, I try a few different approaches to make something work. Each of these attempts is a different branch--I might need to revisit it, or pull stuff out of it. Good luck staring at a branch name and working out if it's landloop or landloop2 that had the most working version of the code.

Super late, but I think a good approach would be to use an issue/work tracker of really any flavor (even manually), log all of your to-do headings as issues, and then just name each branch after the associated issue/job number.