CASE FILE: Productivity

Subject: Dennis Lynn Rader Known for: Church council president, compliance officer, Boy Scout leader Estimated victims: 10 Operational period: 1974–1991

Dennis Rader kept records of everything.

Journals. Sketches. Timelines. Coded entries. He maintained meticulous documentation across three decades, in multiple formats, stored in multiple locations. He was, in the most technical sense of the phrase, extraordinarily organised.

He was also a church council president, a compliance officer for the city of Park City (Kansas), and held a degree in administration of justice. The man had systems.

The irony — and there is always irony — is that his record-keeping was ultimately what caught him. A floppy disk. Metadata. A deleted file that wasn’t quite deleted.

But that’s a lesson in digital hygiene, not documentation. The documentation itself was impeccable.

The case for obsessive record-keeping:

Most people dramatically underestimate how much mental energy they waste on trying to remember things. Decisions made, reasoning behind them, follow-up actions, commitments given. It lives in your head, taking up space, degrading over time.

Write it down. Date it. File it somewhere logical.

Future-you, opening a file from six months ago and finding exactly the context you need, will feel something close to euphoria.

Rader understood this. His error was in the content, not the method.

Adjust accordingly.

File closed. Results pending.