I've been wanting to make a todo list that is sensitive to this. It's called Promises, and, when you add a todo item, you make a "promise" to resolve it. Every day the promise is active, it gets a bit more grey, and after a month it eventually fades away and gets added to a section of the app called "the hell of broken promises", where it can never be removed from again. If you do resolve it, it gets fulfilled and goes away with a nice animation.

Hopefully, this will force you to consider what you actually intend to finish versus what you're just adding for the feel-good factor of "oh yeah, I'm definitely going to do this at SOME point, years later". I don't know whether that's good or not, but it'll be a fun project, and I think we'd all be better off if we could say "you know, if I haven't read that news article in the two months since I've added it, it's probably not important enough to keep around".