Initiative Tracker

It's been a few years since I have run 5e, but when I did managing combat initiative order was one of the more cumbersome aspects.  I've seen a number of solutions online and this is what I came up with.

First of all, I passed off initiative management to my players.  While I was drawing up the combat map and getting minis out, my players would roll their initiative and the rogue would write them down and read the names back in order to the druid who would clip them to the initiative tree.  The tree sat on the corner of the table where everyone could see it and know who was up next.  All I had to do was roll initiative for the enemies and let my players handle the rest.

Something else I did was group up the enemies into 2-3 groups who would all act together.  This streamlined things immensely, especially when there were large groups of small enemies.

The tree itself was just a dowel and a couple pieces of scrap wood.  The names were hot glued onto clothes pins.  Originally they were just strips of index card and sharpie, but I eventually made fancier color-coded ones with my Cricut vinyl cutter.  Since the names were on both sides, the party could all be pointing left and the enemies could be pointing right, to help distinguish things visually.

That's about it, nothing super involved or complicated, but it sped up combat and took some off of my DM plate.