There is new blogpost on this subject!
There are cases where system stores list of things to do, and then there are some worker processes that check the list, pick something to work on, do it, and remove from the list.
Proper solution is to use some kind of queuing system. There is even PgQ which works withing PostgreSQL, but some people are not happy with it, as it requires compilation and installation. So they just use plain selects.
Will that work OK?