dfrench - thank you so much for your comments. I see now that the second parallel gateway was syncronizing the two paths to eachother, therefore waiting for both to finish before moving on to the next task.

I have now changed things a bit. I removed both parallel gateways since the first one was moot and the second one was syncronizing things. I have added a field in the last form that is only filled if the 30-second timer finishes before the 2nd form is filled and submitted. And, I have added an exclusive data-based event after my timer. It checks to see if the other path was submitted and "confirm" received a value. If it didn't, it should show the notification form with "Task Note" with the value "NO FEEDBACK SENT IN" (a literal string I added on the timer path). If "confirm" HAS a value, it should not send anything and end there.

I see that the timer does what it is asked (it waits for 30 seconds before moving on) but the notification still only shows up AFTER the second form in the process is completed (the path running parallel to the timer's path). Why is this?

What I want is when the first form in the process is submitted, two things should happen:

1) the 2nd form be available to the user to fill out and submit
2) the timer starts to count down 30 seconds

If the 2nd form is submitted BEFORE the timer finishes, then they get a notification form showing the values they previously filled out and that's it.

If the 2nd form is NOT submitted before the timer finishes, a literal string is assigned to "TASK_NOTE" and the notification form is sent to the user, showing the values s/he entered in the 1st form and the literal string showing up bascially saying that "NO FEEDBACK SENT IN" (meaning the 2nd form was not submitted).

How do I go about doing this?

Thanks in advance.

Katie

PS: I have attached my latest project files.