I’ve had it with the modern-day open office: bright fluorescent lights; fish-bowl distracting conference rooms that always leaves you wondering who your manager is meeting with; long shared desks.

When I worked on a Wall Street trading floor years ago, there was nowhere to hide; nowhere to find some peace and quiet; nowhere to think deeply. My entrepreneurial friends have also opted for shared working spaces, in the name of teamwork and collaboration. But open plan office spaces, with gabbing colleagues and malfunctioning copy machines, can impede you from getting high-quality work done. Paradoxically, to be more productive, we might need to think “inside the box” and revisit the cubicle as the preferred format for workspaces.

Once upon a time, corporate executives thought cubicles were an optimal format for workers. Furniture giant Hermann Miller created the first cubicle in 1967 as a response to the chaos of open offices: rows of desks laden with clattering typewriters and chattering telephones, which was thought of as tremendously distracting and counterproductive.

You can say the same thing about open offices, but cubicles actually absorb and reduce sounds, and their walls cut down on visual distractions. All this makes it easier to perform better at your job. For example, cubicles seamlessly integrate technology by incorporating power and data management in panels, so you can easily plug in and situate your monitor without disturbing your colleagues. Moreover, cubicles give architects and designers flexibility when designing office spaces.

Ultimately, the decline of the cubicle may have come about because of costs. Very often, executives are held accountable for metrics, such as spending and what the payoff is for the company, and less on qualitative measures, such as workplace satisfaction

Incentivized in this way, large companies have pressured major furniture manufacturers to reduce prices, which, in turn, have produced anemic, marginally functional designs to save on costs. A long flat desk with a common cable trough, now called a benching system, is far cheaper than producing all the parts and pieces required for a cubicle.

The end result is the loss of privacy and productivity for employees. In her book Quiet, Susan Cain recognizes how open office plans are part of a “New Groupthink,” in which collaboration and teamwork must be fostered to a fault. She quotes a marketing agency director who says, “Employees are putting their whole lives up on Facebook and Twitter…There’s no reason they should behind a cubicle wall.” But when the time calls for thinking deeply, you probably need walls to block out the distractions.

Indeed, a recent survey by Oxford Economics shows how open office plans can impede productivity: 53% of the 1,200 people surveyed said they were less productive and satisfied when they could hear ambient noise.

Kabir Sehgal is a New York Times bestselling author of several books including Coined: The Rich Life of Money And How Its History Has Shaped Us. He is a Grammy and Latin Grammy Award winner. He was previously a vice president at JPMorgan.