The doc doesn't say you can't use tic/toc to time very short things, and clearly that is not true:
>> tic, x = 1; toc
Elapsed time is 0.000323 seconds.
What the doc does say is that if your total time is less than 0.1s, then you probably want to put whatever you are timing in a loop, and divide the total time by the number of iterations, otherwise your results are likely to be contaminated by noise. The timeit function is your friend.