Is there a way to avoid having tickets with future due dates show up in backlogs?

Is there a way to avoid having tickets with future due dates show up in backlogs?

We often set tickets to have future due dates to perform an action for a customer at some point in the future.  Perhaps we should be using tasks instead??? 

In any case, all these future tickets make our Backlog dashboard high.  Is there a way to deal with this?