Windows 8 will not go into sleep mode

Of course it does...you are NOT turning it off...

Maybe you didn't understand my question. I have my sleep timer on the monitor set for 10 minutes and my Pc set to shut down in 30 minutes. My question is, why does the monitor shut down in 10 minutes and why doesn't the PC go into sleep mode in 30 minutes like its supposed to?...lights on the PC are on and the hard drive is still running?

Software like media center that shares media can block the pc sleep modes.
you can run cmd.exe as a admin
then type the command
powercfg.exe /energy
This will generate a report that will show if any software is blocking the sleep request. Your next step would be to configure the software in control panel power options.