Techniques to process data sporadically transmitted at designated times in a wireless communication system, such as paging indicator (PI) bits on the quick paging channel in cdma2000. These techniques support a sleep cycle that may start at virtually anytime and having a sleep duration selected based on a fine time increment. The increment is selected such that the finger processors and symbol combiner of a rake receiver may be easily moved to the proper positions upon waking up from a sleep. Techniques are also provided to align the symbol combiner timing to that of a particular multipath in the received signal, if necessary. With these techniques, a terminal may perform a sleep between a pair of assigned PI bits and may wake up and process a single PI bit.