In this paper we propose an electronic domain timing phase selection scheme for the optical communication systems suffering from inter-symbol-interference (ISI) distortion due to chromatic dispersion (CD) or polarization mode dispersion (PMD). In the presence of CD/PMD a proper timing phase selection is important for discrete time domain equalizers, since different timing phases produce different nonlinear ISI channels of different severity. The proposed timing phase recovery scheme based on dispersion minimization (DM) practically approximates the optimal minimum mean squared error (MMSE) timing phase without training signals which reduces overall throughput substantially, especially in time-varying channels such as PMD. The simulation results show that the proposed DM timing agrees with MMSE timing phase, under proper normalization of the received signals, for various dispersion and OSNR.