There are a number of ways of achieving that sort of timed polling, but the best choice depends a lot on what else the application is doing and what else it interacts with.

You could use Tk (Tk's with timer driven events) or POE (about which I know very little). You could hand roll a polled loop using a queue to manage events and sleep to wait until the next even is due.

If you show us a sketch of your code we may be able to help a little more.