It can easily and often does lead to messy rube goldberg machines.
There was a game AI talk a while back, I forget the name unfortunately, but as I recall the guy was pointing out this friction and suggesting additions we could make at the programming language level to better support that kind of time spanning logic.
This what Rich Hickey (Clojure author) has termed “place oriented programming”, when the focus is mutating memory addresses and having to synchronize everything, but failing to model time as a first class concept.
I’m not aware of any general purpose programming language that successfully models time explicitly, Verilog might be the closest to that.
Step 1, solve "time" for general computing.
The difficulty here is that our periods are local out of both necessity and desire; we don't fail to model time as a first class concept, we bring time-as-first-class with us and then attempt to merge our perspectives with varying degrees of success.
We're trying to rectify the observations of Zeno, a professional turtle hunter, and a track coach with a stopwatch when each one has their own functional definition of time driven by intent.
Sounds interesting. If it's not too much of an effort, could you dig up a reference?
Mind you my memory may have distorted it a little beyond what it was, but it's loosely on the topic!