Sooo many awesome suggestions here for you, OP!
One thing I don’t think I’ve seen yet, is that you should create your calendar events as barebones as possible and then edit them to add each additional detail. This will notify everyone else attached of the updates to your event, every time you update any of them.
I was working on a personal project when a friend visited. I went through a quick series of successes and failures with my project and openly emoted at each, afterward he said to me “I’ve never seen anyone go through so many emotions in such a short amount of time.”