Is there a way to add analysis comments to my correspondence games?

I play correspondence games. Sometimes I play moves that have a purpose that is not obvious at first sight. I'd like to annotate those moves in the analysis tab so that when I come back to the game two days later I can remember why I played them. Is there a way to do this? I know that there is a Notes tab where I can write this down, but that is inconvenient for several reasons (which I'll be happy to discuss if anyone is interested).

Why is the notes tab inconvenient? It works fine for me.

My annotations (and I guess everybody else's) follow more or less this format:

Move 15: Ng6 pins his f pawn, which should allow 16. Bf4, forking his knight and rook. He can prevent this with 15. ... Qh2, though. (Probably the squares don't make sense, I just made them up for this example).

This works, sure, but it's quite sloppy for several reasons:

1. I have to write down manually the move in which I made the annotation.

2. I have to write down manually the move I made and whatever variations I anticipate.

3. These annotations get old very quickly. After a couple of moves they're no longer useful for the current game. This leaves me with two options, none of which are very appealing:
3a. Leave them there anyway. This means that every time I go back to that game I have to check its annotations to see whether they are still useful, only to find out in most cases that they're not. This gets worse the more annotations you write, of course. If there are many of them I might even have to scroll down to find the last one and check whether it's still useful, typically just to find out that it's not.
3b. Manually delete them as soon as they become outdated. Having to delete each outdated annotation is an inconvenience by itself. However, the worst part is that those annotations are very handy when I review the game after it's over. When I review my games very often I think "why on earth I played that". My annotations would be very helpful at that point.

4. With so many things to do manually, this is a very error-prone task, which requires me to carefully pay attention to how I do it when I should only be paying attention to my game.

Again, nothing of this is terrible or game breaking, but it's certainly inconvenient and sloppy. And none of it would be a problem if I could just write the annotations directly in the analysis tool, just like you do in studies.

yess

@Alonshow I totally agree that it would be easier to annotate like in a study. However, the meantime, I suggest you use notes but in a slightly different way.

You can sort of use it a "log" of sorts. The newer moves/annotations would be at the top most, so you don't have to scroll down for the most relevant information. Additionally, I suggest not deleting anything so that you can use it as a reference after the game. If relevance is really an issue, you can place some sort of visual marker where the information starts to get irrelevant.

So, every move that you want to annotate, all you will have to do is write down the move at the topmost, write down your annotations, and replace your relevance marker.

For example, your annotations could look like this ( you are white)

Move 11: e5 I know it will give me an isolated pawn, but I think the space and activity will be more than enough compensation
Move 10: f4, this is a little risky, but my opponent must retreat their knight if they want to prevent the pawn break e5
(Relevance Marker) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Move 5: Qxd4 Now my queen should be centralized and very hard to kick out. They could play c5, but that would weaken their pawn structure
Move 3: d4, I am going for the scotch because my opponent is lower rated

Thank you for your ideas, @AdvaitK , they seem quite interesting. I'll try them and let you know how it works.

Update: the relevance marker proposed by @AdvaitK is proving really handy and reducing significantly the amount of inconvenience of this process. It doesn't work very well in chess.com because the interface is different, but in Lichess it makes the annotation process much smoother. Still, this is just a workaround, so here's hoping that in the future analysis annotations will become available for live games.

A simple solution is to place the game(s) in a study. There you have many options for annotating the game as you wish. This is what I do, after a game is played. If you mean for a game you are currently playing couldn't you create a study of the game as its in progress and use the study to annotate your thought process? You'd have to be careful not to turn on the engine though. I am not sure what Lichess policy is on creating studies of games that are in progress (except that engine use is ofcourse not allowed).

Just a note: As of April 1, 2023 studies are broken (arrows and display of annotation symbols (?? etc) on the board are both not showing) and its even not possible to create new moves (or at least placing pieces for new moves is often broken).

Studies are fixed!

@EmaciatedSpaniard said in #8:
> A simple solution is to place the game(s) in a study. There you have many options for annotating the game as you wish. This is what I do, after a game is played. If you mean for a game you are currently playing couldn't you create a study of the game as its in progress and use the study to annotate your thought process?

I imagine that would work, but this thread is not really about finding something that works because I have that anyway: the notes. It's more about how inconvenient it is to annotate ongoing games with the notes, even if it works (less inconvenient now thanks to AdvaitK's suggestion, though). I imagine creating a study of a game in progress would be even more inconvenient (having to switch back and forth between my game and the study, etc.), so, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't look very promising. But thanks for the suggestion anyway.