It's very important that you should not confuse "effort" with work as you mentioned

For force, say 10N, I imagine a dumbbell of weight 1kg, the feeling I get when I lift it.

The feeling you get as a biological organism is about the effort and some other chemical reactions in your body.

Work is rather a concept to actualize the energy transfer going on for an object.

Let me try to reduce them into simple terms:

Work: energy transferred

Energy: work done

They refer to each other in the classical mechanics and they need each other to be meaningful.

Let's think of an analogy given that analogies are not exactly correct but help us internalize the concept.

The analogy I would use is Car and Fuel. The fuel you put in your car, which is oil, is like your energy. You've got 5 J of energy that you can burn. All right, what happens then when you burn that energy of 5 J? You'll do some work on the object. But what's the amount? It's 5 J of work done, which can also be measured by the thrust (F) that the engine creates burning it times the displacement (d).

You've burned 5 J of energy to do 5 J of work on the car.

Having work without transferring energy is not possible as it's defined to explain the energy transfer. When we transfer energy, we actually do work.

It's very important that you should not confuse "effort" with work as you mentioned

For force, say 10N, I imagine a dumbbell of weight 1kg, the feeling I get when I lift it.

The feeling you get as a biological organism is about the effort and some other chemical reactions in your body.

Work is rather a concept to actualize the energy transfer going on for a moving object.

Let me try to reduce them into simple terms:

Work: energy transferred

Energy: work done

They refer to each other in the classical mechanics and they need each other to be meaningful.

Let's think of an analogy given that analogies are not exactly correct but help us internalize the concept.

The analogy I would use is Car and Fuel. The fuel you put in your car, which is oil, is like your energy. You've got 5 J of energy that you can burn. All right, what happens then when you burn that energy of 5 J? You'll do some work on the object. But what's the amount? It's 5 J of work done, which can also be measured by the thrust (F) that the engine creates burning it times the displacement (d).

You've burned 5 J of energy to do 5 J of work on the car.

Having work without transferring energy is not possible as it's defined to explain the energy transfer. When we transfer energy, we actually do work.