Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described. In some systems, a user equipment (UE) may monitor sets of decoding candidates over a search space in each monitoring occasion to detect downlink control transmissions. Such a monitoring process may be resource intensive. To reduce the processing power involved in monitoring the control channel, a UE may measure resources associated with the downlink control channel to obtain a quality metric. The UE may compare the quality metric to one or more thresholds and may perform a decoding process on a set of configured decoding candidates for the downlink control channel based on the comparing. In some cases, if the channel quality is relatively good, the UE may perform a list decoding process using a list size less than a maximum list size or may perform partial data tone processing to reduce the processing complexity for some of the decoding candidates.