Sometimes you get half way through a task when you realise you need to do some refactoring before you can continue. One option is to just do the refactoring as you go, but if it's more than a trivial refactoring that will make it hard work for anyone reviewing the code. They'll need to untangle the refactoring from the feature implementation.

If you're using git, you have another option. Commit your unfinished work as "WIP" on a new branch then checkout the previous commit - the one before you started this task.

Then you can do the refactoring without your feature work getting in the way. When you've finished, you just commit that refactoring work with a nice commit message and then switch back your WIP branch.

Once you've done that, you can rebase your WIP onto the refactoring work and carry on where you left off.

It's as if you travelled back in time to do the refactoring just before you needed it.