The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has recognized machine-type communications (MTCs) as a vital medium to drive the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the key challenges in MTC is to reduce the energy consumption of the MTC user equipment (UE). Currently, the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE)/LTE-advanced (LTE-A) standards incorporate discontinuous reception (DRX) mechanism for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a modified DRX mechanism incorporating the quick sleeping indication (QSI) as a novel, simple, and energy-efficient solution for low-complexity, low-mobility MTC UEs. We demonstrate our QSI transmission mechanisms using the broadcast and synchronization channels of LTE/LTE-A for MTC UEs in normal coverage and using the data channel for MTC UEs operating in “coverage enhancement” (CE) mode. For MTC UEs in normal coverage, our simulation results and analysis show that our DRX with QSI mechanisms result in 45% improvement in the energy efficiency and 66% reduction in the computational complexity at the UE receiver, when compared to the current DRX mechanism. For MTC UEs with CE, the energy and computational efficiency increase to 63% and 68%, respectively.