Even when I use git by myself, I like to use branches. This helps me keep my work separate, and avoids issues if I'm working on one thing but need to do a quick fix elsewhere. I also tend to have anything in master set to go to live, so branching helps keep things that aren't ready from going live. Even if you don't have a "production" environment you push to, making sure your master branch is only code that works well is a good idea IMO.

And as another reply mentioned, squashing commits is good for keeping your history cleaner. My branches tend to have a ton of "fix" commits that get squashed out when merging into master.