Trouble understanding, vaguely, how this works

So I'm new to mining and was watching how the pay outs come and was a little confused as to how the miner actually decides if it is mining or not. I see on the app that it is active but the Hash rate is calculating while on the website you come to by clicking on "how does this work" or "Norton wallet" it will list a hash rate and say the status is mining and after refreshing after a little bit my pending pay out has increased. But before too long that status on the site has changed to idle and payout seems to halt. I see nor correlation to the ten minute cycle and the switch from mining to idle. Is there some setting or task I should be running to ensure mining continues or is it just how the network operates to distribute work to others?

Other issues I could foresee might be my wireless contention might not be consistent enough for something that needs to communicate incredibly precisely. Unnoticeable for causal browsing or even gaming but mining in a network?

Also not sure why the norton wallet in the app says I've 0.000000 ETH but site gives a number, is the app waiting until the minimum payout is accrued to add the ETH or is it waiting on a verification of the "minting"? is that the word for freshly mined crypto? (Yes I am that new)

I also see from time to time the site won't recognize my rig, it says "no rigs found" and display nothing. Is that an issue on Nortons side or is there some process on my end that interrupts the connection (might tie back to wifi stability?)

Drivers are up to date using a GTX 1080, an i7700, windows 10, and norton360lifelock. No error message.

Thank you for any insights.