workflow for working on feature branches and incrementally incorporating "master" changes

If you're working on a feature branch by yourself, what is a good workflow for keeping the branch in up-to-date with "master" as you're developing on the feature branch or is this unnecessary? Should you just wait until you want to officially integrate the feature branch into the "master"?

We were doing:

commit to local feature branch push to remote feature branch ... repeat.... rebase from master (occasionally) push to remote

but at this point the branches have diverged.

We're coming at this from SVN, so we might just be thinking about this the wrong way.

Thanks!