Generally speaking, timers are used for bulk operations.
So if you have a table that you need to iterate and perform tasks for each record, then timers are your best friend.
If you want to perform some tasks on 1 item asynchronously, then you probably have a server action with an input parameter (or a session variable, if you prefer that) and you could consider using a (BPT) process, which does allow you to set an input parameter for your action.