As on nodes, timers can be specified on tasks. See the section called “Timers”.

The special thing about timers for tasks is that the cancel-event for task timers can be customized. By default, a timer on a task will be cancelled when the task is ended (=completed). But with the cancel-event attribute on the timer, process developers can customize that to e.g. task-assign or task-start. The cancel-event supports multiple events. The cancel-event types can be combined by specifying them in a comma separated list in the attribute.