I’ve been experimenting with GoTrio on my Mac Mini M4 for the past couple of weeks, and it’s forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth about how I work. Like many people drowning in endless to-do lists, I had roughly forty items sitting in my task manager at any given time. The app’s core constraint is simple and unforgiving: you can only have three tasks. Not three categories with unlimited subtasks, not a sneaky way to batch things together. Just three.
The app lives in your menu bar and displays your current trio of priorities. When you click it, you see a clean interface where you can mark tasks complete, add new ones (only if you have fewer than three), and start a built-in timer for focused work sessions. The timer follows the Pomodoro philosophy without being rigid about it. You can set custom durations or stick with traditional intervals depending on what the task demands.
What makes GoTrio different from the dozens of other minimalist task apps is how it handles completion. When you finish a task, there’s a brief moment of satisfaction before you’re immediately prompted to fill that empty slot. This creates a rhythm I wasn’t expecting. Instead of endlessly adding tasks and feeling overwhelmed, I started being more deliberate about what actually deserves my attention today. The constraint forces prioritization in a way that feature-rich apps with tags, projects, and due dates never did.
The app requires macOS 14 or later and runs quietly in the background. During my testing, it used roughly 80MB of memory and barely registered on CPU usage. The developer, Axaily, has kept the interface intentionally sparse. There are no themes, no customization options, no integration with other services. This is both a strength and a limitation. If you need your tasks to sync across devices or connect with your calendar, this isn’t the solution. It’s strictly local, strictly focused.
I purchased it for $4.99 from the Mac App Store, which feels appropriate for what it does. There’s no subscription, no in-app purchases, no promotional emails. You pay once and it’s yours. For anyone who finds themselves paralyzed by choice or buried under task list bloat, the enforced simplicity might be exactly what breaks the pattern. The app won’t solve deeper productivity issues, but it will make you answer the question: what are the three things that actually matter today?
