How does the operating system help manage the processor?

Your computer is able to process many different tasks all at the same time.  But, in order for your computer to do all of this, it must assign a piece of time to each activity.   The operating system has to switch between different processes thousands of times a second so that everything seems to be working effortlessly.  When you are allowed to do more than one task at a time, you are considered to be multitasking.