I also came to this topic while implementing a matrix LED display.
In one word, you may build a polling scheduler by using millis() function and timer interrupt in Arduino.
I suggest the following articles from Bill Earl:
https://learn.adafruit.com/multi-tasking-the-arduino-part-1/overview
https://learn.adafruit.com/multi-tasking-the-arduino-part-2/overview and part-3 (I cannot post more links)