Yes, I use a mood chart every day. Not only was it very useful for my diagnosis, but it also helps me to track how I'm doing. It's useful for detecting early warning signs of episodes, but also for looking back, seeing whether I've gotten better or worse, how long I've been in an episode, and what may have been the cause of any changes. I tend to forget what my episodes felt like and how intense they were pretty quickly once they're over and then I start doubting whether I'm really bipolar, whether I really need meds, and so on. It's useful to be able to look back and see that I'm not imagining things.

I agree that mood charts can be a little restrictive sometimes. I get around that by making "footnotes" whenever I want to add something else, and then I just add whatever information I want on the back of the mood chart, like a journal. That way I have the best of both worlds.

I like the mood chart from "Stable Resource Toolkit." For whatever reason the website seems to be down, but I was able to locate the pdf in the Way Back machine. It tracks mood, anxiety, irritability, sleep, weight, and meds. All of those are major factors for me. I use color coding (with a marker) to include quality of sleep in addition to number of hours, because the quality of my sleep varies a lot and I often sleep very badly even if I do spend a seemingly normal number of hours in bed. In addition, I add a row to track my energy level, because my energy level doesn't necessarily correspond to my sleep (in fact it often doesn't depending on my mood).