Timers and scheduling in general has been a very popular request. Direct support from OpenHAB has been delayed for a few months now (only complicated support via Google Calendar has been published so far) so an indirect workaround by us would have been developed for nothing once the official one is released. Having said that I need to chase this up with OH and see where this stands right now as it has been quite a few months since it was promised “to come soon” but I know for a fact their pipeline is looong with the latest releases 
The boost functionality is something many commercial thermostats offer and it was easy enough to make to help people make “some” scheduling without having to break anything in GCal or so…
If you manage to make something, please share and we may include it as an optional feature for people to pull.