On his blog, Mathias Verraes started a series of posts on patterns for decoupling in distributed systems. I'll link to just one of the posts here, but they're all worth your time.

The mind switch is to think of the passage of time as just another Domain Event, exactly like all the other events. After all, if we define a Domain Event as a granular point in time where something happened that is relevant to the business, then certainly the next business day, month, or quarter, is extremely relevant.

Read more [verraes.net]