Sorry to hear you are not finding the guidance you need

The penalty for attempting to become a citizen for free is that you must pick for a very long time.
I presume you are using the free 'iron' picks - these are incredibly slow and collect smaller amounts of ore.
What you need is to get hold of Steel Picks - these will gain you ores 6 times faster than the iron picks.
The minimum time required by using steel picks is about 50 - 70 hours.
Unfortunately, steel picks are player crafted. Newcomers cannot craft them.
So you need to find a Citizen trade steel picks for ore collected.
Swapping ore for steel picks also lengthens the time required to get pnotes

Currently, there are few Citizens online. And very few of these stay in NU.