Surface Pro keeps going to sleep every 1-2 minutes of being idle

What is your screen saver set to, mine was set to 1 minute and "Blank". I changed it to NONE and boom back to normal.

This is not the correct answer I searched and searched. Did all these suggestions. It turns out my theme had the screen saver set to "Blank" and the time to 1 minute. I bet this is the same as most people on this forum.

This is definitely being caused by an outside influence enforcing timeout policies via ActiveSync. This has been the case in every instance and the setting is somewhere in Group Policy depending on how it is enforced or what exact setting is being enforced.

The prior solution of resetting security policies apparently was disabled by a Windows Update (for some people) from Microsoft so it is no longer a valid solution it seems and in addition, domain admins were given the right to disable resetting the policy once it is enforced. The setting was first noted here and the poster there posted where the setting is located in the Exchange Console and since he was a domain administrator within that domain, he disabled the enforcement of the policy. This same setting can be caused if you simply connect to a wireless network that pushes particular policies as well.

Other email accounts and Outlook and other mail applications can cause this as well but it is not clear which ones or what that timeout is. For instance, Gmail is definitely setting a timeout policy (for some) but I have yet to discover the official word on that or how to disable the setting or how long is the timeout.

If you mirror all of the settings and actions on the Surface Pro on another Windows 8 machine, the same issue will occur. I tested this on multiple non-Domain machines running Windows 8 Home, Pro and Enterprise. Every machine experienced this issue.

In the same forum post above, the last commenter states:

This fixed it for me on my desktop.   Control Panel> Administrative Tools> Local Security Policy> Local Policies> Security Options> Interactive Logon: Machine Inactivity Limit> I set it to 1800 seconds so that it will not go to lock screen till after 30 minutes.  By default, it was set to 60 seconds. 

I would recommend trying that but realistically, finding the account or outside influence causing this setting is best. For me, it was my work's Exchange account. What was worse is that even if I removed the account, the policy did not un-enforce. At the time, I was able to reset the security policy and fix it.

Sevenforums.com has a solution that may fix it, which resets all Group Policy settings to default. Please try it to see if the issue is corrected. I would recommend creating a restore point first.

Another possible Group Policy setting that may be enforced by an outside account is:

Computer configuration->Administrative Templates->System->Logon->Allow users to select when a password is required when resuming from connected standby

As a last resort i had to reset windows.  A big pain, but the problem has been fixed.  I no longer have any sleep issues.