I must ask this during my chess game analysis

I knew using a book journal to analyze my games was going to be a work in progress and would take a while before I found a system that worked. I was not sure how things were going to evolve, but the main thing was to lock in on what made me want to keep going.

The first few games were me analyzing possible moves that I didn't end up taking during my games. I wrote down as many variations as possible and then moved along.

As I kept doing that, I sensed there was something missing in what I was doing, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was.

Then I saw a video by international master Andras Toth who did a book review of "How to Study Chess on Your Own" by Davorin Kuljasevic.

 
Visualizing variations was key in self improvement, but he said the secret sauce lies in asking the most important question: What is the evaluation?

This post is more a reminder to myself to always be evaluating and calculating.

So when I'm doing self analysis of my past tournament games, I'm asking myself more often, "Am I good here?" or "Am I bad here?" or "Am I still bad?" But I have to ask some variation of the evaluation question. It's more important given that I don't use a computer unless I believe the situation is so complex it is required.

The sauce in doing self analysis with a book journal is to constantly be asking myself, "If I took this route, what is the evaluation, and would it have been better than what I actually did?"
Asking this question has helped a lot. I think it's also caused me to spend more time on the clock in future games, and yes time trouble is a standard feature of my games that I'm definitely working on. For now, the foundation is still being set.

There was a recent tournament game where I entered an endgame with both of us having six pawns and one rook. Looked like a draw but I had a rook ready to eat.

That is ... if I wanted my rook to eat. White to move, I had the option of Rxa7 or, realistically, Rf2. I took the pawn believing I was OK if he checked me. When I looked at Rf2, all of the conclusions were I was still fine, and I'm probably walking toward a draw.

But the game took a hella lot of turns from there. I spent about a week analyzing this endgame alone, and I kept asking myself after every analysis: "Am I winning?" Without using the computer and just hardcore calculating lines, I believed there were five instances where I was winning but fumbled a move that made it even.

The game ended up in a draw because I did not want to lose on time - I had about six minutes remaining and was three hours in with another game during the day still to play.

Tough to swallow because I did well overall in this tournament and had a chance to get first place. But at least I'm gaining the lessons from these past games. And I have to keep asking myself what is the evaluation, because that's the only way I'm going to get better at analysis.