I may have to sit on the other side of this one. First; I'll point out that the busier I am doing technology tasks that are "on my plate" the less I am connected to what my staff is doing and the more I have to ask. Most of the time I tend to need to connect with what they're working on, not that they're working. If I have to ask too often, it's usually because I'm not balancing my personal technical load with my management responsibilities as well as I ought to.
But that's a quick conversation, not a request to provide time tracking. There are times I have to ask for time tracking - from time to time, usually right after I recommend that we add staff, the amount of scrutiny that I come under with what I'm doing with the people we already have has a tendency to increase. It's a fair question: "we need three more programmers." "What are you doing with the ones you have?" Your boss may be asking you this for good reason.
I think at the end of the day, assess your relationship with your workplace, and the manager you report to directly. From time to time we are all asked to justify things we wish we didn't have to justify; we're all asked to perform the mundane tasks that we wish we didn't have to do. If the over all balance is good, try to be forgiving of the details. If over all the balance is bad, well, then you know what that means. The problem isn't time tracking.
"I don't think anyone outside IT would
understand if you tell them every
little thing you do all day."
Try. I've found plenty of non technology managers that do honestly try to keep some basic understanding of what technical folks are doing. Try keeping a log for a few days "Logged in to router, reviewed tunnel config, realized it was wrong, updated it, contacted the client to verify that it was still running. 30 minutes.
And if you find that frequently you're being questioned on the what - sell your boss on larger items before you do it. "Hey, found this really cool thing that I think could have a huge positive business impact - fewer tech support calls, less downtime, increased productivity and sales - I'm going to try to find some time Wednesday to play with it, get it installed on a VM and make sure it will work for us" "Hey that's great" is better than "you spent four hours doing what again?" after the fact. Maybe not about everything - not even necessarily daily (though if things are rough right now, maybe daily isn't a bad idea) - but do try to communicate with non-techies. It can even come in handy down the road as a skill in its own right.
BTW - my current technical answer to this solution is something along the lines of reporting off of our ticket system and svnstats reporting off of our subversion repository. I find the graphs, charts, and the actual notes of all the checkins is a nice way to provide feedback and a sense of movement to non-technical management on long term things, and the ticket tracking reports for the shorter term, all hopefully without having to force our fine technical staff to waste their precious time typing things twice. At least I hope it works out, fingers crossed...