Perhaps cut your other tasks into smaller slices, so the longest wait time on the system is still smaller than the time it takes to overwrite your buffer,
For reading temperature sensors, most micros do the conversion of ADC's in the hardware and write a flag when done, if a digital sensor, most 1 wire or I2C ones have quite a lengthy timeout window, equally some micros I2C interfaces need you to only fill the buffer and tell it to write, and has a buffer for read, allowing you to let the hardware do your heavy lifting.
Same goes for TTL serial out if your sending data that way, use the hardware buffer for your read and write operations.
This way you dont need to use interrupts, just make the first thing you check that status pin of the chip before starting a new task. otherwise plod on through the state machine