It seems to say that you should do it from your own time or sneak it in, in between because otherwise it would never get fixed. In my experience though, usuall

It seems to say that you should do it from your own time or sneak it in, in between because otherwise it would never get fixed. In my experience though, usually the tech debt that matters is not that easy to fix, it often requires careful planning, coordination between different teams and takes a significant amount of time - more than a week definitely, as otherwise it wouldn't be that big of an issue. It frequently also involves some level of risk of things going wrong. Fixing or paying off tech debt will usually take significant time and you would be unable to work on actual features. So what will you say when you are unable to work on those features to higher ups if they haven't agreed to prioritise this? I also don't understand the claim that always assigning portion of the points to sprints doesn't work out. It works out for us, exactly the way described to not work as well. We identify the tech debt, we estimate it, and we prioritise it. Then each sprint certain percentage will go to those tickets.