A method and system to determine when a wireless terminal has been paged by a servicing base station. An encoded paging burst is received on a paging channel and then decoded to produce a decoded paging burst. The decoded paging burst is processed to determine if it is a null page. When the encoded paging burst is a null page, subsequent processing operations scheduled to follow a later null page are rescheduled and immediately processed, allowing the wireless terminal to re-enter the sleep mode more quickly following the receipt of a subsequent paging burst.