My Office file comments have become a hidden task list

I start the morning in Outlook and see a few notifications from Word and Excel files. Someone mentioned me in a comment, someone else assigned a comment as a task, and a colleague replied in a PowerPoint thread. I open the first link, fix the wording, and resolve the comment. That part works.

Then the day moves on. I have a meeting, update a tracker, and answer Teams messages. Later, I know there were more comments waiting in a spreadsheet, but I cannot remember which file they were in. They are not sitting cleanly beside my Planner tasks, my To Do list, or the meeting actions I review at the end of the day.

By mid-afternoon, I am chasing a document approval and realise the action was technically assigned in a comment three days ago. It was not ignored on purpose. It just lived inside the file, behind an email link, mixed with every other notification.

What I want is simple: when review comments become work, I need a small routine that tells me where those tasks live, how to check them, when to turn them into Planner or To Do tasks, and how to close the loop without opening every shared file one by one.