When analysing focus mostly on the moments that you felt critical during the game. Write down your analysis, the variations you calculated.
Attach every mistake with ?? or ?!. Think about the reasons behind the mistakes.
Check the lines with an engine,. Be curios and check the lines until you understand the moves and evaluations.
Analyse the opening phase carefully.
Make a list of mistakes.
The categories are divided into opening, tactics, positional, thinking model, attitude.
Here some examples of positions mistakes. Wrong plan, bad exchanges, piece placement, misevaluation, missing prophylactic moves, unnecessary prophylaxis overestimating pawn center, overestimating passed d pawn.
It means that you are perhaps performing badly at the opening, or not able to see threats (meaning you have to work more on your defensive skills) or you are not able to build up positions where you can use your attacking abilities. To find out what is your case you should make a list of your most common mistakes, like after analysing 50 to 100 of your losses. With this list you will be able to set priorities on your practice. Just by making the list you should improve 100 or more points because you will begin to make less of those common mistakes.
Thanks, this is really great advice! Sorry to be an inconvenience, but could you please suggest how I should approach identifying and naming mistakes; this should be obvious but I'm a bit slow regarding such things! Once again, thank you so much for the help!
First, better would be to have a friend or a coach, someone who is stronger than you, to help you with the analysis. Doing together with someone is funnier and more effective.
One of the best sources for a list of mistakes is chapter 5 in Pump Up Your Rating, by Axel Smith. Here are some points of this chapter.
Don't use an engine. Accepting that we do a lot of mistakes is the first step to accept this task.
I have to go, later I go on.