> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tied.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Working a conversation together
> Participants, mentions, private notes and snooze — the four things that keep several people in one thread from tripping over each other.
A conversation has exactly one owner: the assignee. Everything on this page exists because one owner is rarely the only person who needs to be involved.
## Participants watch; the assignee owns
Three ways to end up watching a conversation:
From the participants control in the conversation header.
Being mentioned adds you automatically. You do not have to accept anything.
Useful for a conversation you want to keep an eye on without taking it off whoever has it.
Once you are a participant you are notified every time anyone replies — the customer or a colleague. You can stop watching at any time from the same control, including when someone else added you.
**Participant is not a claim of ownership.** The assignee is still the one person accountable for
the conversation. If you find yourself watching something that nobody owns, assign it rather than
adding more watchers to it.
The header shows the first few participants and counts the rest. There is no limit on how many a conversation can have, though a conversation with a dozen watchers is usually a sign it wanted a [team](/inbox/teams) instead.
## Private notes
A private note is a message in the thread that the customer never receives. It is stored on the conversation like any other message and excluded from everything customer-facing — the widget, the email thread, the channel.
Use one to leave context for whoever picks the conversation up next: what you already tried, what the customer actually wants as opposed to what they asked for, why it is taking so long.
**Check which mode the composer is in before you type.** The composer switches between reply and
private note, and the thing that makes a private note useful — that it looks like a normal message
— is the same thing that makes sending one as a reply so easy to do.
## Mentions
Typing `@` in a **private note** offers your teammates and your teams. Mentioning someone does two things at once: it notifies them, and it adds them as a participant so they stay notified about what happens next.
**Mentions only work in private notes.** An `@` in a public reply is just an `@` — it goes to the
customer as typed and notifies nobody. This is deliberate: there is no version of mentioning a
colleague that should ever be visible to the person you are supporting.
There is no separate mentions inbox. A mention reaches you through your normal [notifications](/admin/profile), so the way to make mentions useful is to have those configured the way you actually work.
## Snooze
Snoozing sets a conversation aside until a moment you choose, and takes it out of your open list until then.
| Option | Comes back |
| - | - |
| **An hour from now** | Sixty minutes later |
| **Tomorrow** | 9:00 the next morning |
| **Next week** | 9:00 on Monday |
| **Next month** | 9:00 on the first Monday |
| **Until the next reply** | Only when the customer says something |
| **Custom…** | Whatever date and time you pick |
**Custom…** opens a date and time picker instead of choosing for you, and it shows up in two places — the resolve dropdown and the [command bar](/inbox/command-bar) — not only this list.
Every snooze also wakes early if the customer replies. A conversation that comes back — by timer or by reply — returns to `open`, not to whatever it was before.
**Snooze is the honest version of `pending`.** `pending` means you are waiting on the customer.
Snooze means you have decided not to look at this until a specific moment. Using `pending` for both
is how an inbox quietly fills with conversations nobody is actually waiting on.
## Next
Getting the list down to what you should be working on.
What search actually looks at, and what it does not.
When a conversation needs a group rather than a list of watchers.
Which of these actually reach you, and where.
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