The Doi formalism treats a reaction-diffusion process as a quantum many-body problem. We use this second-quantized formulation as a starting point to derive a numerical scheme for simulating X-->0 reaction-diffusion processes, following a well-established time discretization procedure. In the case of a reaction zone localized in the configuration space, this formulation provides also a systematic way of designing an optimized, multiple time step algorithm, spending most of the computation time to sample the configurations where the reaction is likely to occur.