Stop doing git checkout master branch

I see a common workflow when starting to work on new task:

git checkout master
git pull # or git pull -r
git checkout -b feat/4605-new-task

But I do things a bit differently. The main difference is that I don't care about the local master branch because the source of truth is always remote origin/master. I don't do commits on master branch, because all changes to the project are done through Pull Requests. So why should I keep the local master in sync with origin/master?

You can do:

git fetch # get latest updates from origin/master
git checkout -b feat/4605-new-task origin/master # --no-track

And here is my workflow:

The first thing I do is fetch the remote master branch to get the latest commits.

I have an alias in my .gitconfig file:

[alias]
  fetch-and-clean-branches = "!git fetch -p && git branch -vv | grep ': gone]'|  grep -v "\\*" | awk '{ print $1; }' | xargs git branch -D"

How to locally delete all remotely merged git branches

Running git fetch-and-clean-branches, will fetch new updates on remote branches and will remove local branches that are not relevant anymore.

Next, I create a new branch based on origin/master:

git checkout -b feat/4605-new-task origin/master # --no-track

I also created an alias for this command:

[alias]
  fetch-and-clean-branches = "!git fetch -p && git branch -vv | grep ': gone]'|  grep -v "\\*" | awk '{ print $1; }' | xargs git branch -D"
  start = "!git fetch-and-clean-branches && git checkout -b \"$1\" --no-track origin/master #"

And I can use it as: git start feat/4605-new-task.

Related: How I use Git