As someone who's worked on multiple teams that used TODO comments and then had a regular type of sprint in which they were grepped and cleared (these weren't perfect projects, there were other organisational problems, but this particular thing was handled well), I was actually quite surprised to get into a discussion recently here on HN about projects where this doesn't happen and TODO comments end up being largely aspirational.

However, I think code and life are slightly different contexts here. I get what you mean about separating aspirations from near-term actual intents but I generally use the word "todo" to refer exclusively to the latter (which still doesn't help a whole lot with ensuring execution as the list still grows quite large).