I postmortem each month shortly after it ends, reflecting on what happened in general and, more specifically, in the context of my goals. Though I don’t share all my insights here, I have made it a practice to share at least one key highlight or insight. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

I tried to take a little of the pressure off in August.

Though I kept stepping, repeating my summer mantra started in June and continued in July, I went into the month of August accepting that I wouldn’t see much by way of results for my business-development labors or on many of my other big-picture goals for the year.

Even in a normal year, the last month of summer brings a lot of distractions. And this year? Given a global pandemic, an economic crisis, and an extraordinarily divisive presidential election? Yeah.

Instead of obsessing about sales goals, I refocused on our efforts to position FrogDog well for the other side of all of this drama, including building new sales tools, planning our fourth-quarter marketing specifics, and creating and beginning to execute on our marketing editorial calendar for 2021. Having forward-thinking, new-horizons-focused work underway does all of us a lot of good.

Aside from these efforts, I kept up the good work on other goal-related fronts in August 2020 as well:

• We rented a car and drove across the border into France for a stay during which we saw Arnaud’s mother and sister. (You can find the first of four posts on the experience here!)

• I kept slogging with the French language, though I confess that I don’t feel the progress I’d hoped to feel by now. I can read more quickly and easily than I did even one or two books ago, yet this doesn’t help me much with conversations and making friends.

• Writing-wise, I managed to get an extraordinary amount of content for FrogDog created in August and hit a minor milestone on my fiction project as well. Hitting a milestone, even a small one, feels good when things need to feel good.

Let’s see what autumn brings. I plan to round out this ridiculous year with my best possible effort. What more can any of us do?

How did summer 2020 treat you?