This piece is a little old, and is ostensibly about Presidential candidates, but the advice applies to anyone with a 'wired' job who needs to think, including scientists and science writers:

In London, Obama and [British Conservative Leader] Cameron commiserated about their days, which are arranged in 15-minute intervals of crisis. They react, but they never have time to reflect. Cameron said he tried to not let aides "chalk up" his schedule with too many commitments. Obama's solution was to set aside time to let his brain work during his mid-August vacation. "The most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking," he said...

The problem is becoming especially acute in science. Scientists generally like to be as wired-in as other people in technology professions. Combine today's ADHD society with way too many scientific journals, insane amounts of online scientific data, and a tight funding situation that requires near-continuous grant writing, and you have a recipe for science that advances by just doing the next obvious and often trivial thing, because that's all people have time to think about. Many scientists in the past famously used huge blocks of uniterrupted time to do their work. That time wasn't necessarily solitary - physicists like Einstein and Bohr got a lot of mileage out of conversations with others.