I don't know what you are doing exactly, but if you want timers, you should go to an event-loop system like POE or see Roll your own Event-loop . There are others too, see Event
The bonus with POE is that you get to use POE::Component::IRC or Bot::BasicBot. These already implement message priorities and queuing for flood protection. They also support multiple timers through POE. Each has their own plug-in system, and CPAN has a bunch of plug-ins for them. You'll see some of them at the previous links.