Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described. A user equipment (UE) may support signaling an indication of a duration (for example, in UE capability information) for the UE to perform a beam switch (for example, to switch between different directional beams). Among other examples, base stations may be configured with a default value related to a duration for UEs to perform a beam switch. Thus, in an absence of the above signaling by the UE, base stations may identify a duration for UEs to perform a beam switch according to the configured default value. Additionally, base stations may allocate symbols between different physical channels (such as, downlink channels or uplink channels) related to directional communications. One or more symbols may be exclusive of or be part of resources related to the physical channels to provide improvements to beam switching for UEs.