@Anonymous-own-fico wrote:hauling, that reminds me.
I recently read a book (read the first few chapters and skimmmed the rest), whose title is Psych Yourself Rich: Get the Mindset and Discipline You Need to Build Your Financial Life. It's about how our emotions can stand in the way of handling money well.
I didn't read enough of it to know whether it deals with lowest-balance vs high-interest, but got the impression that you shouldn't simply settle for the system that suits you best. Instead you need to improve yourself before you can improve your finances.
The middle chapters of many personal finance books deal with how to organize your personal finances. In its simplest form, it's about putting it down on paper. If you have an outline on a piece of paper of how various methods will pay off your debt, it could be an eye-opener.
But I wonder whether a overwhelmed person would find the book among the others on the shelf. Its title somehow isn't quite right.
That's an interesting book. And I understand the thinking behind improving yourself first. But when collectors are screaming at you on the phone, we can't always make things line up and behave. 
My favorite version of the snowball, for those who have a gi-normous number of CC's with balances, is to pay off the three with the lowest balances first. Then get cold and calculating and switch to paying off the highest APR.
The fact is that with the exception of those who have horrible CC debt resulting from some act-of-God-or-Congress event like uninsured medical expenses or divorce or unemployment, or a horrendous combination of the three of these, their CC debt has resulted from the emotional use of credit, specifically credit cards. They're practicing "retail therapy", in the sense that when they're stressed or unhappy or bored or unfulfilled or whatever from something going on elsewhere in their lives (employment, relationship, whatever), they go shopping, and they're using plastic for things that they can't afford.
If you get yourself in credit trouble due to emotions, you're going to need to take an emotional route out of credit trouble. You can't suddenly switch over to the rational side of your brain and focus on APR's. So you might need to do something that results in a "yay-me" reaction, that positively reinforces what you've done so far, and keeps you going. Almost anyone who has tried to make a major change in their life, whether ceasing to misuse credit, or alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or dark chocolate (mmmm), or nicotine, or any other addictive substance or habit, has to make a difficult two-steps-forward-one-step-back transition. It's hard to change habits. So whether it's logical or not, anything that increases the chances that someone will stick with the program, I'm gonna support it.
But in the end, I agree, there has to be a huge sea-change in the mindset and the emotions that created the problem in the first place. AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) has a great collection of -isms, and one of them is, Wherever you go, there you are. In other words, you can change the outward circumstances of your life, but it's still you running the show. Until you change you, nothing else is going to change either.