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：日常生活由重复性惯习（routine）组织而成，这些惯习协调生物节律与社会及职业需求。个体因工作时间、家庭义务和社会承诺的差异，形成了全天活动组织的独特方式。人们是否存在具有特定活动安排的典型日？这些典型日或惯习出现的频率如何，且是否因人而异？我们提出一个量化此类重复性惯习、其时间持续性及个体差异性的框架。我们将个体生命中的连续日建模为不同类型典型日（即惯习）的序列。通过表征所有人共同活动模式（睡眠、移动及设备使用）的每日特征，我们识别出一小组可捕捉日常行为主导结构的惯习类型。进而检验个体是否维持稳定且特异的类型分布，并以特征化方式在这些类型间转换。利用三项纵向研究中1086名参与者的被动感知数据（涵盖153,000人-天）验证该框架，我们发现日常生活通常可分解为约八种惯习类型，且每个个体维持着对这些类型的特征性分布。个体在惯习类型间的时间分配与逐日转换动态，其内部相似性显著高于个体间差异，且在数周至数月的观测窗口及不同年龄、职业和健康状况的人群中保持稳定。惯习持续性与责任感等人格特质存在适度关联，但总体上在年龄和性别间相似。我们的研究确立了惯习模式作为稳定的个体特异性行为指纹，为个性化健康监测提供了应用基础。