so this this normal? isn't it skipping all these things to work on? i'm just not getting any shares
I am not familiar with that pool but can you assign your own difficulty? If so assign a low difficulty and you will see more shares submitted. But low diff shares are worth less so it shouldn't make any difference in the long run unless the difficulty is just way too high for your hashrate. Most pools will adjust diff up and down based on how many shares your worker submits to try and find an optimal level where the miner is submitting a handful of shares per minute.