"It still feels a bit unnatural for me to work in increments this small and I often tend to combine some of them but I have been making an effort to try it out."
Avdi: "And I think that's for me one of the most interesting parts of reading this book, is just realizing how granularly these individual refactorings are broken down. Not just that the refactorings as a whole are relatively short changes, but also that they're broken down into very small steps."
Good red, green, refactor forces you to "stay on the baby steps path". This can't be overstated. When I first bumped into Martin Fowler's "refactoring" I couldn't believe how little he did at each step. (This also plays into fast testing, since you need to be able to run them all the time)
I've written the mechanics in such a way that each step of each refactoring is as small as possible. I emphasize the safe way of doing the refactoring, which is to take small steps and test after every one. At work I usually take larger steps than some of the baby steps described, but if I run into a bug, I back out the step and take the smaller steps. The steps include a number of references to special cases. The steps thus also function as a checklist; I often forget these things myself.