I've taken to adding a small linter: TODOs must have a date attached, and after that date they'll fail a (fast, skippable) lint job. My goal isn't to require

I've taken to adding a small linter: TODOs must have a date attached, and after that date they'll fail a (fast, skippable) lint job. My goal isn't to require tackling them, merely to make them annoying enough to prioritize. So far it has worked out pretty well - within a day or three of a deadline passing, about half the time the date gets bumped a month and a task is made for the next sprint, a third it's just fixed, and the remainder are no longer relevant so they're just deleted.