Wouldn’t it be great if everyone dealt fairly with everyone else all the time? But most people, some of the time (including you and me), want or need a thing badly enough that they put their own interests ahead of other people’s. It’s human nature. And sometimes they want something badly enough to be quite underhand about it.

One of the classic ways to get you to agree to something when you don’t mean to is to put you on the spot. Unscrupulous companies play a questionable version of this game when they offer you a fantastic deal on their holiday or car or timeshare, but tell you the deal is only on the table for a few hours so you’ll have to sign on the dotted line now if you want the best deal.

Most decent people would baulk at doing this to you face to face, but they’ll still exploit the potential of putting you under time pressure. This is a classic negotiating technique, and it can be easy to get caught up in it before you realise that it’s just a ruse.

When the discussion is more ad hoc, this is an easy trick. Your daughter might try to discuss her bedtime when your mind is elsewhere, or when you’re hurrying to go out, in the hope you won’t think the issue through properly and will agree anyway.

It’s also one of the arguments against putting ‘any other business’ on the agenda for meetings – some people will raise a contentious subject without warning under AOB, when no one else has time to prepare their case, in the hope of getting agreement. By that time in a meeting everyone is generally more than ready to get away, and agreeing is generally faster than arguing. At least that’s what the perpetrator is hoping.

So be on your guard against this kind of ploy. Not only can you be sucked into agreeing something you didn’t really mean to, but you’ll also unwittingly encourage the other person to try the same trick with you again in future, now they’ve discovered you’re a sucker for it.

You don’t have to tell the other person you’re on to them, mind you. They won’t like being caught out, and you don’t want to get on the wrong side of them. You can just let them know that now isn’t a good time, or suggest that this item warrants a full discussion and should go on the agenda for the next meeting so everyone has time to prepare for it.

In fact if anyone tries to put you on the spot with a request, and claims it’s urgent (especially when it’s more urgent to them than to you), I’d recommend the response a good friend of mine always used to use. It works on colleagues, friends, family and even on your kids. In fact, it’s brilliant for kids. If anyone pressed this friend for a decision when he didn’t have time to deal with it he’d always say, ‘If you need an answer now, it’s no.’