I open a ticket saying things like "this needs to be documented, estimate is X hours to document fully; don't forget gotchas A,B, and C", or "fix this corner ca

I open a ticket saying things like "this needs to be documented, estimate is X hours to document fully; don't forget gotchas A,B, and C", or "fix this corner case that occurs X percent of the time", or "this will run slowly when traffic reaches X because of Y" and such, giving it a priority that indicates exactly what the technical debt would cost if it wasn't resolved (super low priority is really cheap, no big deal, extremely minor inconvenience). This is partially so I don't forget about it, but also to document that something isn't as clean as it could be. These are not hard and fast "measurement" numbers, but by looking at the ticketing system, you can get a general idea of how far things are behind. It also gives you a list of alternative things to work on when you're getting burned out on the active tasks.