Living Understaffed
65 episodes listed below
Chaos, coping, and candid friendship.
Living Understaffed turns messy adult life into quick, funny, emotionally direct conversation. Erica, Sarah, and occasional guests move from workplace stress and dating chaos to trauma, books, grief, travel, friendship, and the tiny logistics that somehow break a week.
PRESS PLAY
Living Understaffed is a conversational show about the kind of adulthood that never seems to have enough hours, money, patience, sleep, or emotional bandwidth. Erica and Sarah anchor it with fast banter, inside-joke momentum, and a willingness to say the uncomfortable part plainly. The premise is simple: life is understaffed. The texture is messier and more specific. Episodes wander through dating letdowns, divorce aftermath, moving houses, overwork, burnout, friendship, family tension, travel anxiety, creative projects, and the tiny domestic choices that become emotional evidence. A lawn chair argument can become a conversation about being cared for. A half-finished reorganization spiral can stand in for burnout. A dog sweater can share space with grief, goals, and the need for rest. The show is funny because the details are so lived-in, not because the hard parts are softened. Recent episodes also make room for serious conversations about domestic abuse, coercive control, trauma, infertility, mental health, consent, and the slow process of learning to trust yourself again. Those heavier moments are handled through personal reflection and guest perspective rather than detached advice. Books matter here too. Authors and book friends show up in conversations about survival, spice, historical drama, complicated heroines, and why certain stories help people name their own experiences. The show also likes a side quest. One episode can detour into duels, loopholes, stage daggers, radish hair styling, and the appeal of women behaving dramatically in history. Another can move through leadership workshops, improv, job interviews, and the difference between a rigid plan and meeting the room. It works best for listeners who want warmth without tidiness. The conversations are not polished into neat segments, and that is part of the appeal. They sound like people catching each other in real time, sometimes joking, sometimes processing, sometimes realizing the point only after the story has already run wild. Living Understaffed stands apart by refusing to split humor and vulnerability into separate lanes. It lets both happen in the same breath.
Made for: Best for listeners who like fast banter about burnout, dating, work, friendship, and recovery. It also fits anyone who prefers personal stories with humor still attached.
What sets it apart: The show blends rapid-fire catch-up energy with blunt emotional processing, so a casual tangent can suddenly reveal the real issue underneath. Its mix of personal chaos, book-world guests, historical detours, and heavy conversations gives it more range than a standard life-update podcast.
"Living Understaffed," hosted by two empowered and witty women, offers candid discussions on the challenges faced by millennial women. From dissecting office politics to navigating modern relationships, the show shares unfiltered stories and diverse book recommendations, all served with sarcasm. Tune in for genuine conversations embracing the complexities of being a millennial woman. Laugh, learn, and liberate your thoughts with humor and sass.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Sarah and Erica turn candid stories about work, relationships and recovery into recognizable lessons about boundaries, rest and emotional health.
Sarah and Erica make personal disclosure the working method of Living Understaffed. Their conversations move through relationship boundaries, divorce, loneliness, rest and the strain of work without sanding off the embarrassment or uncertainty.
Sarah and Erica turn lawn-chair fights into the relationship debrief you wish came with snacks.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A funny, sharp conversation about hurt feelings, reciprocity, and basic decency.
Sarah and Erica keep the conversation messy in the best way. The lawn chairs story gives it a nice comic jolt, but what stays with it is the hurt underneath: wanting basic care, noticing defensive habits, and getting tired of excuses dressed up as explanations.
A raw conversation about survival mode, coercive control, and the slow work after.
Living Understaffed treats survival mode as a question of holding ground, making hard calls, and getting through the crash that comes after. It also makes room for the hush and stillness that follow, along with the slower work of healing.
A loose catch-up that turns a royal-ball scandal into a 40,000-francs showdown.
Living Understaffed starts as a catch-up and then drifts into stranger, more entertaining territory: Erica is in Seattle, Sarah notices the backdrop, and the two trade a Christmas gift from Erica's mom that includes a book about how to not be a sad girl and a knitted potholder.
Alabama travel talk turns into a messy, funny check-in on sleep, germs, and friendship.
Erica and Sarah settle into Alabama and use the stay to braid together treasure hunting in Madison, sleep debt, and bodily gross-out humor. Sarah's hard-to-shake nap habits become a steady comic thread, and Erica's attempts to wake her, including the dog's tongue in her mouth,…
Improv, layoffs, and leadership advice with a grounded pulse.
Living Understaffed opens with a layoff story and a run of moments that land at just the right time before moving into the practical side of work.
Outback lives, told close to the dust.
Rural motherhood, told with grit and care.
Living Understaffed hosts Erica and Sarah restart the show after a summer break, switching to an episode every two weeks because of Erica's fall travel and her photo-digitizing business, From Moments to Forever.
Sarah and Erica skip the small talk and jump right in.
A listener-discretion warning opens a deeply emotional, unexpectedly raw conversation with a romance author about domestic abuse, coercive control, trauma, infertility, and mental health.
Erica and Sarah come back after about three weeks away and roll right back into the intro at the mic.
This episode of the Living Understaffed podcast features a group of women from diverse backgrounds discussing burnout, self-care, and celebrating their two-year anniversary.
The hosts Erica and Sarah, joined by indie author Aisley Rose, discuss personal chaos including travel stress, work overload, and home reorganization in their typically messy podcast style.
Erica and Sarah are in Alabama, hanging out in Erica's boyfriend's apartment while he is away in Michigan for a family thing.
It opens in the weeds.
Two hosts discuss the stressful recent weeks involving understaffing, moving to a new place with roommates, and dealing with leftover furniture during the holidays.
Sarah and Erica discuss their understaffed lives, including new merch, weekly episodes, and Erica's recent single status and moving challenges.
Two hosts discuss feeling overwhelmed and understaffed at work, dealing with procrastination and productivity guilt while juggling personal tasks like moving.
The hosts discuss their struggles with recording this episode about overthinking and overachieving while dealing with technical issues and podcast production challenges.
Sarah and Erica discuss balancing remote work and podcasting while on vacation in Hawaii, emphasizing self-care and managing creative responsibilities.