Pretty much what I do too, even working in collaborative projects. Once nice thing about git is that it makes it easy to go back and clean up your history with rebase before publishing it to others, so you can make as big of a mess as you want in your local branches without anyone else having to see it.

So yes, having "interm" or "wip" commits would be an anti-pattern in a shared repo, as it makes it harder for others to see what changes you made. For a local branch though; not a big deal.