How should a beginner improve gameplay speed? I am a fairly low skill player and am wanting to improve my game, but I feel as though I need to gain at least a bit more speed in my decision making to make better progress. I am a fairly analytical person and because of this I tend to over-analyze a situation and take an extremely long time to deliberate my moves. For example, I have played casual games with friends that ended up taking 2 hours to complete mostly because of my slow-decision making. I really think if I could speed up my gameplay I'd be able to play more games in less time and see more benefit out of that. It would also mean less irritation when playing in person games, which would also be nice.

I would like to clarify that I understand speed isn't normally a main focus for beginners when compared to learning tactics and gaining a more general understanding of the game. However, in my case (and I am sure other people like me) it is a concern. I have considered many options to remedy this issue, such as trying to play with a time-limit, but I fear that may just cause me to rush and make a lot of mistakes. Would I be better off to put in more time to studying tactics and moves so that I just recognize ideal choices faster? I didn't see any questions involving the same problem and any advice here would be helpful.
You should only be spending time on a couple of candidate moves. This might shorten the thinking time if you rapidly dismiss moves that bring nothing to your position.

IM Jeremy Silman says in his book The Amateur's Mind that each move should have at least two purposes (amongst attacking, defending, gaining space, developing, gaining initiative, etc.).

You can also limit the lines you calculate to one and a half move : your move, the opponent's most likely reply, and then your next move.

I hope this helps.