She sat at her kitchen table long after the house had gone quiet, pen in hand, rewriting Tuesday for the third time that week. The color-coded blocks in her planner had looked so reasonable on Sunday night: exercise at six, work from eight to five, dinner prep at five-thirty, a phone call to her mother at seven. By Tuesday afternoon, almost none of it had happened in order, and she was now doing what she always did when a plan failed her. She was building a better plan.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from this. It is not the tiredness of a full day, which usually has some satisfaction folded into it. It is the tiredness of believing, quietly and persistently, that if the system were only tighter, the day would finally hold together. Buy the right planner. Batch the tasks. Wake up earlier. Guard the calendar. Somewhere beneath all of it sits an assumption most of us have never said out loud; that time is a resource we manage well enough to earn peace, and if we have not earned it yet, we have simply not managed hard enough.
Apostle Paul writes something into the book of Ephesians that cuts directly against this assumption, and it is worth slowing down to actually read it rather than skimming past it the way a phrase gets skimmed once it has been printed on enough coffee mugs.
15 Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
Ephesians 5:15-16 New International Version
Older translations render that middle phrase “making the most of every opportunity” as “redeeming the time,” and the older phrase is, in some ways, the more honest one. Paul is not telling the Ephesian church to manage their time. He is telling them to redeem it. Those are not the same instruction, and the difference is the whole argument of today’s article.
The Word Behind “Redeeming”
The Greek word behind “redeeming” here is exagorazo, a marketplace term. It carries the sense of buying something back, often at a cost, often from a condition of loss. It is the same family of word used elsewhere in the New Testament to describe being bought back from slavery. Paul is not picturing a well-organized merchant efficiently allocating his hours. He is picturing someone walking through a market where time itself has been mishandled, wasted, or stolen, and buying it back on purpose, at a price, because the days are evil and none of this happens automatically.
This matters a whole lot for anyone who has ever felt like a failure at time management. If the command were simply to manage time well, then a wasted afternoon would be a moral failure, full stop, and the only faithful response would be tighter discipline next time. But if the command is to redeem time, then the starting assumption is different. The starting assumption is that time will be lost. Interruptions will happen. Days will go sideways. Sickness will come. Grief will come. A friend will call in the middle of the afternoon needing something that was not on the list. Redeeming is not a strategy for preventing loss. It is a practice for responding to loss that has already happened, or is about to happen, with intention rather than despair.
This reframing does something quietly significant to the whole project of planning a life. It moves planning out of the category of self-justification and into the category of stewardship. A woman who believes she must manage her time perfectly is, whether she says it this way or not, trying to earn something with her hours. Peace, usually. Or worth. A woman who believes she is called to redeem her time, buying back what the days threaten to take, is doing something closer to what a steward does with a household that was never fully hers to begin with. She did not create the twenty-four hours she was given today. She received them. What she does with the ones that get interrupted, wasted, or spent poorly is not a referendum on her character. It is simply the next act of stewardship.
Where Willpower Runs Out
Most productivity advice, including a great deal of it written from a Christian perspective, still quietly assumes that the primary tool available to a person is willpower. Try harder. Wake earlier. Say no more often. Build better habits through repetition and discipline until the habit becomes automatic and the willpower is no longer needed. None of this is wrong, exactly, and some of it is genuinely useful. But it tends to run out at precisely the moments a person needs it most, and it offers very little to say to someone in a season where willpower simply is not the limiting factor.
Consider a man caring for an aging parent, waking at two in the morning for a phone call, running on four hours of sleep, and trying to hold down a full-time job during the day. His planner is not failing because he has not tried hard enough. It is failing because the season itself has taken hours that used to belong to him and handed them somewhere else, and no amount of color-coding will give those hours back. What he needs is not a better system for managing time he does not have. He needs a theology of time that can hold a season like this one without collapsing into either despair or self-blame.
This is where the willpower idea quietly runs out, and where redemption offers something better. Redeeming time does not promise to give a person more of it. It promises that even the hours a person did not choose, the interrupted ones, the exhausted ones, the ones spent in a hospital waiting room instead of at a desk, are not wasted simply because they went unplanned. They can still be bought back. Not by working harder inside them, necessarily, but by bringing intention to them. A phone call at two in the morning, answered with real presence rather than resentment, is time redeemed, even though it will never show up as a completed task on any list.
What This Looks Like in an Ordinary Week
It would be easy to leave this idea entirely abstract, so it is worth walking through what redeeming the time can look like inside a week that has nothing dramatic in it at all. Consider Wednesday. Wednesday rarely announces itself as significant. There is no crisis, no grief, no obvious interruption. And yet Wednesday is exactly the kind of day where the habit of redemption either takes root or does not, because Wednesday is where most of a life actually happens.
A woman opens her planner on Wednesday morning and finds three meetings, a grocery run, a school pickup, and a list of six tasks she did not finish on Tuesday. If she is operating out of the willpower, Wednesday is a battle to be won through discipline like get through the list, do not get distracted, earn the right to rest by finishing everything. But if she is operating out of the ease of redemption, Wednesday becomes something different. The unfinished tasks from Tuesday are not evidence that she failed at time management. They are simply time that needs to be bought back today, at whatever cost today requires, which might mean letting one of them go entirely. The interruption at two in the afternoon, when a coworker needs twenty minutes she had not planned to give, is not a threat to the day’s success. It is an opportunity to redeem twenty minutes that the day was always going to take from somewhere.
This does not mean planning becomes unnecessary or that structure stops mattering. Paul’s instruction is still to walk wisely, not carelessly, and wisdom includes forethought. A planner, used well, is simply a tool for practicing wisdom in advance, the same way a budget is a tool for practicing generosity in advance rather than an end in itself.
A Different Kind of Calendar
Somewhere along the way, many of us inherited a calendar that measures a day almost entirely by output. Tasks completed. Boxes checked. A full to-do list is treated as evidence of a life well spent, and an empty one, or worse, a half-finished one, is treated as evidence of failure. This is not a biblical view of time. It is a productivity culture view of time that has quietly borrowed the language of stewardship without borrowing its substance.
A calendar built on redemption measures a day differently. It asks not only what got done, but what got bought back. Did I redeem the wasted hour by choosing rest instead of guilt? Did I redeem the interrupted afternoon by treating the interruption as legitimate rather than as an enemy of the plan? Did I redeem the evening that fell apart by going to bed in peace rather than staying up rewriting a system that was never going to solve the actual problem? These are not questions a to-do list can answer. They require a different kind of reflection, one rooted less in efficiency and more in trust.
This is, in the end, the real difference between managing time and redeeming it. Management assumes the hours belong to the manager, and success means controlling them well enough to prevent loss. Redemption assumes the hours were always on loan, that loss is part of what it means to live inside days the scripture itself calls evil, and that the faithful response to loss is not despair but a deliberate, ongoing act of buying the time back, one ordinary Wednesday at a time.
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Conclusion
The woman at her kitchen table, rewriting Tuesday for the third time, was not failing at time management. She had simply inherited a pattern that could never have delivered what she was asking of it. No planner, however well designed, can prevent the days from being what Paul already told the Ephesians they would be. What a planner can do, held loosely and used wisely, is give a person a place to practice redemption in advance, one week at a time, trusting that the hours were never fully hers to control in the first place. They were hers to receive, and hers, again and again, to buy back.
