Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described in which a user equipment (UE) may wake up from a sleep mode of a discontinuous reception (DRX) cycle based on receipt of uplink data. The UE may determine if an elapsed time between a prior receipt of one or more reference signals and an uplink transmission to the base station after waking up from the sleep mode is less than a threshold time value. If the elapsed time is less than the threshold time value, the UE may transmit an uplink transmission associated with the received uplink data prior to receiving one or more reference signals that may be used to update transmission parameters for uplink transmissions. If the elapsed time is at or above the threshold value, the UE may wait to receive the one or more reference signals and update the transmission parameters prior to the uplink transmission.