Daily life is structured by recurring routines that coordinate biological rhythms with social and occupational demands. Individual differences in work schedules, family obligations, and social commitments produce distinctive ways of organizing activities throughout the day. Do people have typical days with certain arrangement of activities? How often do these typical days or routines occur and does this differ from person to person? We introduce a framework for quantifying such recurring routines, their persistence over time and their distinctiveness for different people. We model consecutive days in one's life as a sequence of different types of typical days, i.e. routines. Characterizing each day through patterns of activities common among all people - sleep, movement, and device use - we identify a small set of routine types that capture the dominant structure of everyday behavior. We then test whether individuals maintain stable, person-specific distributions over these types and transition between them in characteristic ways. Validating this framework with passive sensing data from 1,086 participants across 153,000 person-days in three longitudinal studies, we find that daily life typically resolves into approximately eight routine types and each person maintains a characteristic distribution over these types. Both the time allocation across routine types and the day-to-day transition dynamics are substantially more similar within individuals than between them, remaining stable across observation windows spanning weeks to months and across populations differing in age, occupation, and health status. Routine persistence shows modest associations with personality traits such as conscientiousness, but is broadly similar across age and gender. Our findings establish routine patterns as stable, person-specific behavioral fingerprints with applications in personalized health monitoring.

翻译：日常生活由协调生物节律与社会及职业需求的重复性惯常行为所结构化。工作安排、家庭责任和社会承诺的个体差异产生了全天活动组织的独特方式。人们是否拥有特定活动安排的典型一天？这些典型日子或惯常行为出现的频率如何，是否因人而异？本文提出了一种量化这种重复性惯常行为、其时间持续性及其对不同人群独特性的框架。我们将个体生命中的连续日子建模为不同类型的典型日序列，即惯常行为。通过表征所有人共有的活动模式——睡眠、移动和设备使用——来刻画每一天，我们识别出一小类惯常行为类型，这些类型捕捉了日常行为的主导结构。随后，我们检验个体是否在这些类型上保持稳定、特定于个人的分布，并以特征性的方式在这些类型之间进行转换。利用三项纵向研究中1,086名参与者的153,000人日的被动感知数据验证该框架，我们发现日常生活通常可分解为大约八种惯常行为类型，并且每个人在这些类型上保持特征性分布。惯常行为类型的时间分配和日间转换动态在个体内部比个体之间更相似，在跨越数周至数月的观测窗口以及不同年龄、职业和健康状况的人群中保持稳定。惯常行为持续性与尽责性等人格特质存在适度关联，但在不同年龄和性别间大致相似。我们的研究确立了惯常行为模式作为稳定、个体特异的“行为指纹”的地位，在个性化健康监测中具有应用前景。