Run Timer on another Thread

I have a timer on my main window that displays a stop watch. As the timer ticks I also have other buttons that perform other actions. While some of these actions run the timer stops until the action is completed. I’m thinking I need to run the timer on its own thread but haven’t found a way to do this successfully.

What I have in my AppDelegate is the below code and the onTick_ handler that displays the time. How do I put this on its own thread?

set theTimer to NSTimer's scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval_target_selector_userInfo_repeats_(1.0, me, "onTick:", missing value, true)

In practical terms, you can’t. You can’t really use ASObjC in multiple threads, and timers need a thread with a run loop, which means running them on a non-main thread is challenging enough in Objective-C.