This week, I’m writing about the goals that I set for 2012. Dave Ramsey’s book EntreLeadership recommended setting goals across seven key areas of life: career, financial, spiritual, physical, intellectual, family and social.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the process that Cacey and I used to set those goals here.

Today’s post is focused on the last three categories: intellectual, family and social.

Read 16 books. I’m not sure how many books I read last year, but this year I’m going to try and keep track. I want to read 1 book a month, plus 1 bonus book a quarter. I generally read business, history and fiction books. I do 90% of my reading on Kindle, though the first book I’m starting, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, was a gift from a good friend and mentor of mine in paper form.

Learn to play through one saxophone book. I own a saxophone that I don’t know how to play. There, I said it. I also own several starter saxophone books. I don’t have time to take lessons this year, but I’m going to teach myself to play through one of my sax books by the end of the year. First step: getting it out of the case and putting it in my office.

Plan 2 date nights with Cacey every month. I love hanging out with my sweetie and we need time away from our kids to talk, think and have fun together. I am hoping to overachieve this goal, but we wanted to set ourselves up for success. That’s 24 hot dates in 2012.

Do a 1:1 “kid date” every month. We’re both going to take one of our kids out on a one-on-one “date with dad” or “date with mom” every month. We’ll alternate so that each of them get to do this every month with alternating parents. This can be as simple as going to McDonald’s and getting $1 ice cream cones, or it can be going out to dinner. We’ll err on the side of simple.

Do 6 planned family activities on Sunday afternoons. With my job as intense as it is, it’s really easy to just zone out on Sundays. 6 times a year, we’re going to do better than that and plan an activity to make memories with our kids. Whether it’s taking them to Apple Hill or taking them to the park to play, we hope to do this way more than 6 times, but that’s an absolute minimum.

Have Spencer play t-ball this summer. One of the ideas I scratched down was “invest in developing our kids’ talents.” Emma is still only 2, so we don’t have a specific activity she’ll do this year, but Spencer will be 5 this summer. He just finished doing Taekwondo over the winter and really excelled in it. So we think t-ball will be a great outlet for him this year.

Host 10 dinners and a party at our house. We constantly say “we want to have that person over for dinner” and then it doesn’t happen. So we’re working on having 10 different small dinner parties and one larger barbecue party at our house (1 per month, except for December). We’re focused less on inviting good friends we see all the time and more on folks we don’t know well enough. I’d invite everyone who reads this blog, but we don’t have a very large house, so my apologies in advance if you don’t make it to one of these.

So there you have it: most of my intellectual, family and social goals for 2012. What did I miss?