Try a pile cart instead of a file cart

If I still had this file cart in my possession I would have done a video to explain a novel way I used it recently. I don't, so picture this:

I'm on a coaching call when a woman shows her dining table covered in neat piles. It's about 10 feet away from her desk. The piles are neat and she can tell me what's in each of them. She tells a familiar story of how she needs to lay out all of her projects in order to not loose track of them, but hates that they are usually on the table. When she clears it, everything gets jumbled.

I just so happened to have my own personal file cart sitting next to my front door and was eyeing it as she presented her dilemma. I had just brought it downstairs to give away and as she was talking, pictured it as the perfect solution to the dining table dilemma: what if she turned an elfa *file* cart into a *pile* cart?

I had her imagine the cart with 5 shallow drawers (instead of the 3 shallow + 1 deep pictured here.) I proposed she use this solution to house up to 10 piles. She would just lay them flat - up to two per drawer. She'd be able to roll the cart between her desk and her dining table, laying out the piles during the day and putting them back into the cart before dinner time. She could even place the shallow drawers directly on the table.

She loved the idea! Dining table paper problem solved. File cart turned into a pile cart!

Pro tip: You might notice that this doesn't look like a file cart. It is, but it's rigged a bit. Without the top deep drawer, I used it as a file cart for years. Later, with the addition of the top drawer, I used it solely for folded clothing in my closet. You too can rig an elfa rolling file cart from @thecontainerstore by adding on mesh drawers in various depths. Try it!