Based on both the use of real-world data and a simulation approach, this tutorial article looks at how overlooking right censoring, left truncation, competing events and recurrent event methods in analyses of time-to-event data can lead to suboptimal or biased estimations. The simulation approach enables a comparison with the truth and thus concrete estimations of bias for methods that (i) do not consider right censoring (leading to underestimation of survival), (ii) do not consider left truncation (leading to overestimation of survival), (iii) treat competing risks as right-censoring (leading to overestimation of survival), and (iv) consider only the first of a series of recurrent events for a given individual.