There isn’t any one best or right way to go about ID, but the general process is that people propose an ID, and then others can agree or disagree with it. The notifications on your dashboard are mostly about people commenting on your observations and/or making and/or refining or agreeing/disagreeing with ID’s on your observations. In practice, this is usually quite slow. I find for plants it is slower than for animals, but it is highly dependent on the taxon and also region. Some taxa and some regions are more heavily watched than others.
For example, I spend hours going through and ID’ing certain taxa, but only in broad regions that I’m familiar with, usually the northeastern US and Canada, sometimes more localized regions.
Some things might get ID’ed immediately, but others might take weeks or months. I find a lot of users catch up on growing-season plant observations over the winter, so if you post something now, it might not get ID’ed until January or February of next year.
I also encourage people to exercise restraint with ID. You don’t need to ID everything to species level. If you feel reasonably certain about a genus, family, or even a broader grouping, but don’t really know beyond that, then guess the broad grouping. This can be helpful for allowing people to hone it down. People who watch the broader grouping can then get more specific. For example, I often go through pages of un-ID’ed oaks or maples in my area. If you are certain something as an oak, someone like me might come along and get more specific about it.
You can also use iNaturalist though as a tool to research ID. You can look through pages of research-grade observations (be careful, though, some of them might be mis-ID’ed) and you can also look on the page for a particular taxon, then hit “Similar Species”, to see what other taxa are commonly confused with it. It will show a heading " Other species commonly misidentified as this species in (place)." and you can change the place in the top-right corner of the page.
If you feel reasonably confident of your ability to distinguish between commonly confused species, it will be relatively safer to make ID’s on that taxon. This can be a good way to discover things you might not have thought to check against, like how people often aren’t aware to check against red-seeded dandelions when reporting common dandelions, or newbie birders might not realize there are two crow species (Fish crow and American crow) in much of the eastern U.S.
I also recommend using external tools, and you’ll need different tools for different types of organisms. For example, for birds, I use eBird to check range maps and timing of arrival/departure/migration and frequency in their bar charts, which you can fine-tune to the level of individual counties or even specific sites if they have enough data. For insects, BugGuide.net is an amazing site (and useful in a very different sort of way). For plants, I love BONAP for checking range maps.
It’s okay to make mistakes. But please do your best and share your reasoning if you’re uncertain about something. I have learned a TON from other users, including from users who aren’t sure about their ID’s…someone being like: “Well, I normally would think it is such-and-such, except for (such-and-such characteristic) which makes me uncertain, it could also be (this other species).” – This is how I start getting pushed more towards the expert level, when I start realizing how little I actually know, because other people are sharing their reasoning behind their skepticism.
